Assessing the cyber-trustworthiness of human-as-a-sensor reports from mobile devices

The Human-as-a-Sensor (HaaS) paradigm, where it is human users rather than automated sensor systems that detect and report events or incidents has gained considerable traction over the last decades, especially as Internet-connected smartphones have helped develop an information sharing culture in society. In the law enforcement and civil protection space, HaaS is typically used to harvest information that enhances situational awareness regarding physical hazards, crimes and evolving emergencies. The trustworthiness of this information is typically studied in relation to the trustworthiness of the human sensors. However, malicious modification, prevention or delay of reports can also be the result of cyber or cyber-physical security breaches affecting the mobile devices and network infrastructure used to deliver HaaS reports. Examples of these can be denial of service attacks, where the timely delivery of reports is important, and location spoofing attacks, where the accuracy of the location of an incident is important. The aim of this paper is to introduce this cyber-trustworthiness aspect in HaaS and propose a mechanism for scoring reports in terms of their cyber-trustworthiness based on features of the mobile device that are monitored in real-time. Our initial results show that this is a promising line of work that can enhance the reliability of HaaS.