FaceChange: Attaining Neighbor Node Anonymity in Mobile Opportunistic Social Networks With Fine-Grained Control

Abstract

In mobile opportunistic social networks (MOSNs), mobile devices carried by people communicate with each other directly when they meet for proximity-based MOSN services (e.g., file sharing) without the support of infrastructures. In current methods, when nodes meet, they simply communicate with their real IDs, which leads to privacy and security concerns. Anonymizing real IDs among neighbor nodes solves such concerns. However, this prevents nodes from collecting real ID-based encountering information, which is needed to support MOSN services. Therefore, in this paper, we propose FaceChange that can support both anonymizing real IDs among neighbor nodes and collecting real ID-based encountering information. For node anonymity, two encountering nodes communicate anonymously. Only when the two nodes disconnect with each other, each node forwards an encrypted encountering evidence to the encountered node to enable encountering information collection. A set of novel schemes are designed to ensure the confidentiality and uniqueness of encountering evidences. FaceChange also supports fine-grained control over what information is shared with the encountered node based on attribute similarity (i.e., trust), which is calculated without disclosing attributes. Advanced extensions for sharing real IDs between mutually trusted nodes and more efficient encountering evidence collection are also proposed. Extensive analysis and experiments show the effectiveness of FaceChange on protecting node privacy and meanwhile supporting the encountering information collection in MOSNs. Implementation on smartphones also demonstrates its energy efficiency.