Data Trustworthiness Assessment for Traffic Condition Participatory Sensing Scenario

Abstract: Participatory Sensing (PS) is a common mode of data collection where valuable data is gathered from many contributors, each providing data from the user’s or the device’s surroundings via a mobile device, such as a smartphone. This has the advantage of cost-efficiency and wide-scale data collection. One of the application areas for PS is the collection of traffic data. The cost of collecting roving sensor data, such as vehicle probe data, is significantly lower than that of traditional stationary sensors such as radar and inductive loops. The collected data could pave the way for providing accurate and high-resolution traffic information that is important to transportation planning. The problem with PS is that it is open, and anyone can register and participate in a sensing task. A malicious user is likely to submit false data without performing the sensing task for personal advantage or, even worse, to attack on a large scale with clear intentions. For example, in real-time traffic monitoring, attackers may report false alerts of traffic jams to divert traffic on the road ahead or directly interfere with the system’s observation and judgment of road conditions, triggering large-scale traffic guidance errors. An efficient method of assessing the trustworthiness of data is therefore required. The trustworthiness problem can be approximated as the problem of anomaly detection in time-series data. Traditional predictive model-based anomaly detection models include univariate models for univariate time series such as Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), hypothesis testing, and wavelet analysis, and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for multiple time series such as Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and Long short-term memory (LSTM). When talking about traffic scenarios, some prediction models that consider both spatial and temporal dependencies are likely to perform better than those that only consider temporal dependencies, such as Diffusion Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (DCRNN) and Spatial-Temporal Attention Wavenet (STAWnet). In this project, we built a detailed traffic condition participatory sensing scenario as well as an adversary model. The attacker’s intent is refined into four attack scenarios, namely faking congestion, prolonging congestion, and masking congestion from the beginning or midway through. On the basis, we established a mechanism for assessing the trustworthiness of the data using three traffic prediction models. One model is the time-dependent deep neural network prediction model DCRNN, and the other two are a simplified version of the model DCRNN-NoCov, which ignores spatial dependencies, and ARIMA. The ultimate goal of this evaluation mechanism is to give a list of attackers and to perform data filtering. We use the success rate of distinguishing users as benign or attackers as a metric to evaluate the system’s performance. In all four attack scenarios mentioned above, the system achieves a success rate of more than 80%, obtaining satisfactory results. We also discuss the more desirable attack strategies from the attacker’s point of view.