Efficient Privacy-Aware Forwarding for Enhanced Communication Privacy in Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks

Opportunistic mobile social networks (OMSNs) have become increasingly popular in recent years due to the rise of social media and smartphones. However, message forwarding and sharing social information through intermediary nodes on OMSNs raises privacy concerns as personal data and activities become more exposed. Therefore, maintaining privacy without limiting efficient social interaction is a challenging task. This paper addresses this specific problem of safeguarding user privacy during message forwarding by integrating a privacy layer on the state-of-the-art OMSN routing decision models that empowers users to control their message dissemination. Mainly, we present three user-centric privacy-aware forwarding modes guiding the selection of the next hop in the forwarding path based on social metrics such as common friends and exchanged messages between OMSN nodes. More specifically, we define different social relationship strengths approximating real-world scenarios (familiar, weak tie, stranger) and trust thresholds to give users choices on trust levels for different social contexts and guide the routing decisions. We evaluate the privacy enhancement and network performance through extensive simulations using ONE simulator for several routing schemes (Epidemic, Prophet, and Spray and Wait) and different movement models (random way, bus, and working day). We demonstrate that our modes can enhance privacy by up to 45% in various network scenarios, as measured by the reduction in the likelihood of unintended message propagation, while keeping the message-delivery process effective and efficient.