AnonyTrust: An Anonymous Trust Authentication System for Pervasive Social Networking

Pervasive social networking (PSN) is facilitating and enriching people’s life at any time and in any place. One of the most important issues in PSN is its security and privacy, since users hope their privacy not to be disclosed in social activities. Trust relationship plays a crucial role in the PSN system, and can be utilized to support trustworthy PSN system with anonymous authentication. Thus, this paper proposes an anonymous trust authentication (AnonyTrust) scheme that can simultaneously authenticate identities and trust levels of users with privacy preservation. It also can achieve conditional traceability with a trusted server (TS), and can switch online and offline states with multiple authorized access points (APs). The security analysis and performance evaluation show the scheme is secure and efficient regarding security, anonymity, computational complexity, and communication cost. To verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme, a lightweight secret chat application called AnonyChat is developed in practice. The results show AnonyChat performs well and efficiently in Android devices.Peer reviewe