Protect Pervasive Social Networking Based on Two-Dimensional Trust Levels

Abstract

Social networking has extended its popularity from the Internet to mobile domains. Nowadays, the Internet can work collaboratively with cellular networks and self-organized mobile ad hoc networks to offer advanced pervasive social networking (PSN) at any time and in any place. It is important to secure data communications in PSN for protecting crucial instant social activities and supporting reliable social computing and data mining. Obviously, trust plays an important role in PSN for reciprocal activities among strangers. It helps people overcome perceptions of uncertainty and risk and engages in trusted social behaviors. In this paper, we utilize two dimensions of trust levels evaluated by either a trusted server or individual PSN nodes or both to control PSN data access in a heterogeneous manner on the basis of attribute-based encryption. We formally prove the security of our scheme and analyze its communication and computation complexity. Extensive analysis and performance evaluation based on implementation show that our proposed scheme is highly efficient and provably secure under relevant system and security models.