A novel scheme of anonymous authentication on trust in Pervasive Social Networking

Abstract Pervasive Social Networking (PSN) supports various social activities at any time and in any places with the heterogeneous networks. Trust plays a crucial role in securing PSN. Authenticating trust anonymously is becoming an attractive approach to ensuring trustworthy and privacy-preserving social networking. However, the literature still lacks serious studies on this topic, especially for PSN systems. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to authenticate PSN node trust in an anonymous and semi-distributed manner. The scheme allows one or multiple Authorized Parties (APs) to announce up-to-date aggregate lists of Integrated Node Trust (INT) for certificateless authenticating trust with anonymity, unforgeability, unlinkability and conditional traceability. In addition, multiple APs can cooperate to flexibly conduct trust authentication without significantly increasing computational overhead. Aggregate signature verification further improves scheme efficiency. Security proof, performance analysis and evaluation show that our scheme is effective with regard to security, privacy preservation, computational complexity, communication cost, efficiency, scalability and flexibility.