Hierarchical Trust Level Evaluation for Pervasive Social Networking

Pervasive social networking (PSN) is a fundamental infrastructure in social networking that has played an important role in not only the Internet but also mobile domains. A practical and accurate evaluation system is required to ensure the further development of PSN. Secure and efficient communication is also an essential issue in PSN to increase its adoption in daily life. In this paper, we discuss the establishment of a hierarchical evaluation system to support secure and trustworthy PSN with multiple and variable nodes. The proposed hierarchical evaluation system is essentially based on a special symmetric balanced incomplete block design: the (7, 3, 1)-design and the tree structure. Together, they constitute a multilevel system that supports both our hierarchical trust level (HTL) evaluation system and key agreement scheme. The former solves the problem of trust evaluation in PSN, and the latter guarantees the secure communication of trusted nodes. Note that both security and performance analyses show that the proposed HTL evaluation system can support extensive adoption of efficient and secure PSN.