Secure Pervasive Social Networking Based On Trust

With the rapid growth of the Internet and mobile communication technologies, social network has enriched our life enormously and extended its popularity from the Internet to mobile Internet. The concept of Pervasive Social Networking(PSN) is proposed with the pursuit of more wonderful social experience. Pervasive Social Networking intends to support instant social activities at anytime and anywhere with the support of the Internet, mobile networks and mobile ad hoc networks. It brings new social experiences for users, for instance, strangers in the vicinity can communicate with each other for social activities, e.g., chatting, gaming, information sharing and recommendations. PSN has a prospect development and for supporting crucial pervasive social networking activities, securing pervasive social communications becomes more and more important. However, neither centralized nor distributed solutions can secure PSN communications in a perfect manner to allow practical adoption and deployment currently. For centralized solutions, the connection to a central party may be unavailable because of the attacks of Do S/DDo S. While for distributed solutions, because of the limited computation capacity of mobile device, heavy traffic and processing load are the problem, which could cause a serious performance bottleneck.In this thesis, we propose a scheme to secure pervasive social networking based on trust. We propose two dimensions of trust: general trust that is evaluated by a trusted server(TS) based on the collected history information about PSN nodes; local trust that is evaluated by individual PSN nodes based on the collected history information when it communicated with other nodes. We use the two dimensions of trust to control PSN communication data access on the basis of Key-Policy Attribute-based Encryption(KP-ABE). At first, we designe the scheme algorithms and then further analyze the scheme performance in terms of computation complexity, communication cost and security. We also show a demo system we developed to show our scheme’s applicability in reality. All above results show the efficiency and effectiveness of our scheme.