PSaD: A privacy-preserving social-assisted content dissemination scheme in DTNs

Content dissemination is very useful for many mobile applications, like instant messaging, file sharing, and advertisement broadcast, etc. In real life, for various kinds of time-insensitive contents, such as family photos and video clips, the process of content dissemination forms a delay tolerant networks (DTNs). To improve the data forwarding performance in DTNs, several social-based approaches have been proposed, most of which leverage mobile users' social information, including contact history, moving trajectory, and personal profiles as metrics to design routing schemes. However, although the social-based approaches provide better performance, the revealing of mobile users' information apparently compromises their privacy. Moreover, users' contents may only be shared with a particular group of users rather everyone in the system. In this paper, we propose the PSaD: a Privacy-preserving Social-assisted content Dissemination scheme in DTNs. We apply users' verifiable attributes to establish their social relationships in terms of identical attributes in a privacy-preserving way. Besides, to provide the confidentiality of contents, our approach enables users to encrypt contents before the dissemination process, and only allows users who have particular attributes to decrypt them. Bytrace-driven simulations and experiments, we show the performance, privacy preservation, and efficiency of our proposed scheme.