Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

6-2019

Abstract

Crowdsourcing systems which utilize the human intelligence to solve complex tasks have gained considerable interest and adoption in recent years. However, the majority of existing crowdsourcing systems rely on central servers, which are subject to the weaknesses of traditional trust-based model, such as single point of failure. They are also vulnerable to distributed denial of service (DDoS) and Sybil attacks due to malicious users involvement. In addition, high service fees from the crowdsourcing platform may hinder the development of crowdsourcing. How to address these potential issues has both research and substantial value. In this paper, we conceptualize a blockchain-based decentralized framework for crowdsourcing named CrowdBC, in which a requester’s task can be solved by a crowd of workers without relying on any third trusted institution, users’ privacy can be guaranteed and only low transaction fees are required. In particular, we introduce the architecture of our proposed framework, based on which we give a concrete scheme. We further implement a software prototype on Ethereum public test network with real-world dataset. Experiment results show the feasibility, usability and scalability of our proposed crowdsourcing system.

Keywords

Decentralized framework, Crowdsourcing, Blockchain, Smart contract

Discipline

Information Security

Research Areas

Cybersecurity

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems

Volume

30

Issue

6

First Page

1251

Last Page

1266

ISSN

1045-9219

Identifier

10.1109/TPDS.2018.2881735

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2018.2881735

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