Trust-Based Security Routing Mechanism in Mobile Social Networks

Malicious and selfish behaviors represent a serious security threat against routing in Mobile Social Network (MSN). Due to the unique network characteristics, it is a challenge to design a misbehavior detection scheme in MSN. In this paper, a trust-based security routing mechanism is presented, i.e. a malicious behavior detection mechanism with identity verification scheme. The main idea is to introduce the behavior trust and identity trust to guide the routing. Firstly, we judge the node's behavior based on both comprehensive trust and social relationship strength. And then, we forward messages according to the different measurement within and outside of the friend groups. Besides, we also propose a distributed key management scheme to further improve the efficiency of the proposed mechanism via verifying the identity trust of the node. The simulation results indicate that the proposed routing mechanism can lower the impact of malicious behavior of nodes effectively and it has greater security performance than some classical routing algorithms.