SecureFind: Secure and Privacy-Preserving Object Finding via Mobile Crowdsourcing

TL;DR

SecureFind is a system that uses mobile crowdsourcing and Bluetooth tags to securely and privately locate lost objects, ensuring only owners can access location data while protecting user privacy.

Contribution

The paper introduces SecureFind, a novel system that guarantees object security and user privacy in mobile crowdsourced object finding using Bluetooth tags.

Findings

SecureFind effectively locates objects with high accuracy.

The system preserves user location privacy.

Simulations confirm its efficiency and security.

Abstract

The plummeting cost of Bluetooth tags and the ubiquity of mobile devices are revolutionizing the traditional lost-and-found service. This paper presents SecureFind, a secure and privacy-preserving object-finding system via mobile crowdsourcing. In SecureFind, a unique Bluetooth tag is attached to every valuable object, and the owner of a lost object submits an object-finding request to many mobile users via the SecureFind service provider. Each mobile user involved searches his vicinity for the lost object on behalf of the object owner who can infer the location of his lost object based on the responses from mobile users. SecureFind is designed to ensure strong object security such that only the object owner can discover the location of his lost object as well as offering strong location privacy to mobile users involved. The high efficacy and efficiency of SecureFind are confirmed by extensive simulations.