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

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.