Biblio

In many scenarios, Internet connectivity may not be available. In such situations, device-to-device (D2D) communication may be utilized to establish a peer-to-peer (P2P) network among mobile users in the vicinity. However, this raises a fundamental question as is how to ensure secure communication in such an infrastructure-less network. In this paper, we present an approach that enables connectivity between mobile devices in the vicinity and supports secure communication between users in Internet-isolated locations. Specifically, the proposed solution uses Wi-Fi Aware for establishing a P2P network and the mTLS (mutual Transport Layer Security) protocol to provide mutually authenticated and encrypted message transfer. Besides, a novel decentralized peer authentication (DPA) scheme compatible with Wi-Fi Aware and TLS is proposed, which enables peers to verify other peers to join the network. A proof-of-concept instant messaging application has been developed to test the proposed DPA scheme and to evaluate the performance of the proposed overall approach. Experimental results, which validate the proposed solution, are presented with findings and limitations discussed.

In recent years, mobile social networks (MSNs) have developed rapidly and their application fields are becoming more and more widespread. Due to the continuous movement of nodes in mobile social networks, the network topology is very unstable. How to ensure the credibility of network communication is a subject worth studying. In this paper, based on the characteristics of mobile social networks, the definition of trust level is introduced into the DSR routing protocol, and a trusted DSR routing mechanism (TDR) is proposed. The scheme combines the sliding window model to design the calculation method of trust level between nodes and path trust level. The nodes in the network participate in the routing process according to their trust level. When the source node receives multiple routes carried by the response, the appropriate trusted path is selected according to the path trust level. Through simulation analysis, compared with the original DSR protocol, the TDR protocol improves the performance of average delay, route cost and packet delivery fraction, and verifies the reliability and credibility of the TDR protocol.