An Anonymous Lightweight Authentication Scheme with Scalability for Trustworthy Pervasive Social Networking

Pervasive social networking (PSN) is a social networking platform, which provides instant and ubiquitous social activities, by allowing not only familiar people to communicate, but strangers to involve in social interactions. In the deployment of PSN, secure anonymous authentication on trust is very important. Recently, Yan et al. and Feng et al. proposed anonymous authentication schemes on trust to achieve privacy preservation and reliability in PSN. Their schemes are able to address the security, privacy and reliability challenges in PSN. However, considering the power and computing constraints of mobile devices, the performances of their schemes in terms of computation and communication costs are unsatisfactory and also not scalable. In this work, we propose a pseudo-identity-based scalable lightweight authentication scheme for trustworthy PSN without using any complex mathematical operations like bilinear pairing. The scheme utilises pseudo-identity and a trust-based time-bound signature to achieve secure and privacy-preserving authentication in PSN. To improve efficiency of the scheme, we introduce batch verification of multiple messages, which allows a node to verify up to 63,235 messages per second. The performance evaluation and comparisons show that the scheme is better than existing authentication schemes on trust in PSN in terms of computation cost and communication overhead. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.