VP²-Match: Verifiable Privacy-Aware and Personalized Crowdsourcing Task Matching via Blockchain

Privacy-aware task allocation/matching has been an active research focus in crowdsourcing. However, existing studies focus on an honest-but-curious assumption and a single-attribute matching model. There is a lack of adequate attention paid to scheme designs against malicious behaviors and supporting user-side personalized task matching over multiple attributes. A few recent works employ blockchain and cryptographic techniques to decentralize the matching procedure with verifiable and privacy-preserving on-chain executions. However, they still bear expensive on-chain overhead. In this paper, we propose VP<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula>-Match, a blockchain-assisted (publicly) verifiable privacy-aware crowdsourcing task matching scheme with personalization. VP<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula>-Match extends symmetric hidden vector encryption for user-side expressive matching without compromising their privacy. It avoids costly on-chain matching by letting the blockchain only store evidence/proofs for public verifiability of the matching correctness and for enforcing fair interactions against misbehaviors. Specifically, we construct extended attribute sets and solve matching verification by an algorithmic reduction into subset verification with an accumulator for proof generation. Formal security proof and extensive comparison experiments on Ethereum demonstrate the provable security and better performance of VP<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula>-Match, respectively.