A Scheme to Secure Instant Community Data Access Based on Trust and Contexts

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks provides a generic platform for instant social networking (ISN), such as instant community (IC). For a crucial talk in an instant community, it is important to set up a secure communication channel among trustworthy members in order to avoid malicious eavesdropping or narrow down member communication scope. Previous work hasn't yet considered how to control social communication data access based on trust and other attributes and suffered from a weakness in terms of complexity. In this paper, we propose a scheme to secure instant community data access based on trust levels, contexts and time clock in a fine-grained control manner by applying Attribute-Based Encryption. Any community member can select other members with at least a minimum level of trust for secure ISN communications. The advantages, security and performance of the proposed scheme are evaluated and justified through extensive analysis, security proof and implementation. The results show the efficiency and effectiveness of our scheme.