Reliable and Streaming Truth Discovery in Blockchain-based Crowdsourcing

Prasanna Siddharth Mukkamala, Haiqin Wu, Boris Dudder*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Truth discovery is an effective and compelling approach to addressing data conflicts among different workers and offers more trustworthy truths to task requesters in crowdsourcing. Prior research either focused on studying more accurate truth discovery algorithms or aimed to protect data privacy from the centralized and honest-but-curious crowdsourcing platforms. They all overlooked the stronger threats from the malicious crowdsourcing platform (e.g., may return incorrectly estimated truths) and many critical issues inherited from centralization. This paper proposes a blockchain-based decentralized truth discovery scheme for crowdsourcing, with computation integrity guarantees against malicious participants and support for efficient processing of generic streaming data. We adopt the idea of hybrid storage and computations to ease the expensive on-chain cost. Workers are grouped for off-chain partial truth estimation and smart contracts are leveraged for on-chain final truth aggregation. To prevent any improper computations from malicious entities, we record the hashes of data and worker weights on-chain occasionally. Through theoretical analysis and extensive experiments over real-world and synthetic datasets implemented in Ethereum, we demonstrate that our scheme 1) achieves our reliability goals with certain privacy assurance; 2) exhibits a higher truth estimation accuracy than existing approaches and a lower gas consumption than the baseline.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2023 20th Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking, SECON 2023
PublisherIEEE Computer Society Press
Publication date2023
Pages492-500
ISBN (Electronic)9798350300529
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Event20th Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking, SECON 2023 - Madrid, Spain
Duration: 11 Sep 202314 Sep 2023

Conference

Conference20th Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking, SECON 2023
Country/TerritorySpain
CityMadrid
Period11/09/202314/09/2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 IEEE.

Keywords

  • blockchain
  • crowdsourcing
  • data stream
  • reliability
  • Truth discovery

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