FedCrowd : A Federated and Privacy-Preserving Crowdsourcing Platform on Blockchain

Research output: Journal Publications and ReviewsRGC 21 - Publication in refereed journalpeer-review

52 Scopus Citations
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Detail(s)

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)2060-2073
Number of pages14
Journal / PublicationIEEE Transactions on Services Computing
Volume15
Issue number4
Online published14 Oct 2020
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2022

Abstract

Crowdsourcing has attracted widespread attention in recent years and developed into various applications. An indispensable service of crowdsourcing systems is task recommendation, which means tasks should be accurately recommended to the workers with aligned interests. However, existing systems rely on their separate servers to conduct recommendation services, resulting in computing resources locked inside each isolated system. Moreover, due to the wide attacking surfaces of traditional centralized servers setting, existing systems are subject to single points of failure or malicious data breaches. Therefore, failure to address these inherent limitations properly will hinder the wide adoption of crowdsourcing. In this article, we propose and implement FedCrowd, the first federated and privacy-preserving crowdsourcing platform by using blockchain technology. Our main idea is to employ the smart contract as a trusted platform for systems to release encrypted tasks, and carefully craft matching protocols to enable efficient task recommendations in the ciphertext domain. Our task-matching protocols are highly customized for the decentralized settings, where users can securely perform keyword and range-based queries over federated task indexes without sharing secret keys. We formally analyze the security strengths and complete the prototype implementation on Ethereum. Experiment results demonstrate the feasibility and usability of the FedCrowd platform.

Research Area(s)

  • Crowdsourcing, Privacy-Preserving, Decentralized Application, Searchable Encryption, Blockchain