Secure Routing Strategy Based on Attribute-Based Trust Access Control in Social-Aware Networks

In social aware networks, the routing protocol possesses a considerable amount of sensitive user information during node transmission. When selecting the next hop node for transmitting information in social sensing networks, there is an inherent risk of privacy breach due to malicious nodes attacking innocent nodes within the network. To address the issue of user privacy leakage, this study presents a novel privacy-preserving access control algorithm, termed Attribute Trust-based Security (ATST), which is designed to protect sensitive information. The algorithm, based on encrypting the plaintext message to ensure message security, employs the user’s attributes to create an attribute trust measurement model and a network access control structure. This process identifies a trusted next hop node for information transmission. Subsequently, the access control tree model derived from the attribute is utilized during decryption. After the message reached its destination node, only the user who satisfied the access control criteria of the decryption module was authorized to decrypt the ciphertext. By verifying the trust measurement and access control of nodes through the dual trust mechanism, it prevented malicious nodes from entering the network, causing damage to the network and affecting the performance of the network. In addition, the clear text message was encrypted and transmitted, and the final receiving node was verified to ensure the secure transmission of the message to the destination node. The simulation outcomes demonstrate that the ATST algorithm effectively mitigates the effects of malevolent nodes on the network, ensuring message transfer efficiency and reducing the average delay.