PPAT: An effective scheme ensuring privacy-preserving, accuracy, and trust for worker selection in mobile crowdsensing networks

•An estimated truth value algorithm which can protect the privacy and maintain high accuracy is proposed.•A worker selection algorithm based on workers’ Degree-Of-Trust then achieve lower cost is proposed.•An effective strategy based on high trustworthiness is proposed to defense the malicious conspiracy attack. The data content privacy protection and data accuracy are two important research issues in Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS). However, current researches have rarely been able to satisfy privacy protection as well as data accuracy at the same time, thus hindering the development of MCS. To solve the above issues, for the first time, we have proposed a Privacy Preserving, Accuracy, and Trust data collection scheme (PPAT) for MCS, which can protect the privacy of data content and maintain high accuracy at low-cost style. In PPAT scheme, First, we proposed a scrambled data privacy protection framework which can protect the data of each worker from being known to any third party, which can protect the data privacy of workers. The second, more importantly, we propose a truth value estimation method based on trust computing, which can obtain the truth value more accurately compared to the classic methods under privacy-preserving. In the proposed trust-based truth value calculation, the worker's trust is determined by comparing it with the weight of the trusted worker. Then, the truth value is calculated by the trust of the workers, so that the truth value obtained is more accurate. Through theoretical analysis, it is proved that the proposed PPAT scheme has good worker data content, worker trust, and truth value content privacy protection. Through a large number of simulation experiments, the strategy proposed in this paper has a good ability to protect data content privacy compared to the previous strategy, while improving data quality by 0.5%∼5.7%, and reducing data collection costs by 35.6%∼54.9%.