A Framework for Protecting Privacy on Mobile Social Networks

In recent years, mobile social networks have largely been developed and gained considerable popularity. An approach to protecting privacy on mobile social networks is the use of encryption and access control. Good alternatives for use on mobile social networks are the Public Broadcast Encryption approach for appropriate concordance and consistency with the structure of social networks as well as the Attribute-Based Encryption owing to its capability and proper implementation of the access control policy. Accordingly, in this paper, a framework was presented based on the Public Broadcast Encryption and Attribute-Based Encryption. Using proxies, we outsourced some of these operations in the proposed framework to reduce the computational load of the end device, accelerate the encryption and decryption operations, and decrease the amount of storage memory for keeping the encryption and decryption parameters required by the users in the end-device. Cloud was also employed to store the shared data and user preferences in the social network. The results of investigating the privacy parameters reveal that our framework is superior to the four compared methods. Additionally, the results indicate that in terms of three important parameters in mobile social networks, namely communication, computation, and storage complexity, our method has less complexity and overhead than they have.