An efficient and secure user revocation scheme in mobile social networks

Mobile social network (MSN) is a promising networking and communication platform for users having similar interests (or attributes) to connect and interact with one another. For many recently introduced secure MSN data communication schemes, attribute-based encryption is often adopted to preserve user privacy and prevent outside attackers from eavesdropping. In this paper, we propose an efficient and secure user revocation scheme to address inside attacks based on an attribute-based encryption technique. The proposed scheme enables a trusted authority (TA) to flexibly control the data decryption capability of mobile social users. It disables malicious users from decrypting any data packet. As a result, proper user behavior is encouraged, inside attacks are reduced, and network security is enhanced. Through the analysis, we demonstrate that the proposed user revocation scheme is able to resist attribute collusion attacks and revoke collusion attacks. Extensive simulation results further confirm that the proposed scheme has much smaller communication overhead and much shorter delay than the existing solution [1].