Hierarchical Multi-Authority and Attribute-Based Encryption Friend Discovery Scheme in Mobile Social Networks

In mobile social networks, to guarantee the security and privacy in the friend discovery process, we propose a hierarchical multi-authority and attribute-based encryption (ABE) friend discovery scheme based on ciphertext-policy (CP)-ABE. It employs character attribute subsets to achieve flexible fine-grained access control, which solves the problem of single-point failure and performance bottleneck. Performance analysis demonstrates the superiority of our scheme in terms of system initialization time and key generation time.