Connect with Your Friends and Share Private Information Safely

With the advent of ubiquitous computing and social networking, we often attempt to connect to friend of friends (multi-hop friends) and share private information. However, without explicitly being convinced about the trustworthiness of the entire process, private information may be leaked and this causes users to get shy away from participating in such activities where private information requires to be disclosed. In view of that, we propose a privacy preserving trust management scheme where multi-hop trust is established in an effective way. The scheme consists of two parts. In first part, we formulate a way of trust score computation. In second part, we propose an algorithm for discovering the friend for sharing private data using the concept of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based meta-heuristics, which achieves privacy preserving search strategy. It is a kind of learning distributed parameters and is simple to implement but efficient in outcome. The advantage of our scheme is that it is highly scalable and the participation of the central server is minimal. We consider the communication part of ubiquitous computing consists of tiny sensor nodes forming Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) like that in smart car or smart city.