Securing Communication Data in Pervasive Social Networking Based on Trust with KP-ABE

Pervasive Social Networking (PSN) intends to support instant social activities in a pervasive way at any time and anywhere. In order to protect crucial social activities, ensure communication dependability, and enhance user privacy, securing pervasive social communications becomes especially important. However, neither centralized nor distributed solutions can protect PSN communications as expected. How to automatically control data access in a trustworthy and efficient way is an important security issue. In this article, we propose a scheme to guarantee communication data security in PSN based on two dimensions of trust in a flexible manner on the basis of Key-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (KP-ABE). Its advantages and performance are justified and evaluated through extensive analysis on security, computation complexity, communication cost, scalability, and flexibility, as well as scheme implementation. In addition, we develop a demo system based on Android mobile devices to test our scheme in practice. The results demonstrate its efficiency and effectiveness. Comparison with our previous work based on CP-ABE (Yan and Wang 2017) further shows its feasibility to be applied to PSN.