A Privacy-Preserving Message Forwarding Framework for Opportunistic Cloud of Things

As an emerging communication platform, opportunistic Cloud of Things (CoT) is promising for clients to exchange messages through opportunistic contacts in cloud computing-enabled Internet of Things. Recently, numerous socially aware schemes have been put forward, leveraging users' social attributes and contact history to predict future contacts with the purpose of improving message forwarding efficiency and network throughput. However, individual privacy is generally overlooked in the prediction process and transmission stage of opportunistic CoT. In this paper, we construct a privacy-preserving message forwarding framework for opportunistic CoT to guarantee individual privacy and improve transmission efficiency. We first set up a two-layer architecture of a cloud server to improve communication efficiency for terminal clients. By integrating a security-based mobility prediction algorithm with a routing decision process, our scheme can effectively protect individual privacy. We integrate an attribute-based cryptographic algorithm with a message delivery process to enable our scheme to resist attacks, such as Sybil attack, drop for profit, and data tampered attack. Compared with some existing solutions, our scheme improves network security significantly at the cost of slightly increased communication overhead.