PAD: Privacy-preserving data dissemination in mobile social networks

In this paper, to simultaneously protect the location privacy of each mobile user and improve the performance of the data dissemination process in the mobile social network (MSN), we propose a privacy-preserving data dissemination (PAD) protocol by utilizing the Paillier cryptosystem and its homomorphic property. With PAD protocol, the delivery ratio of the MSN will be improved by selecting several active relay users to help deliver the data, meanwhile, the location privacy of each user against the source user will be protected. Detailed security analysis shows the security of the PAD protocol. Furthermore, massive simulation and evaluation prove the efficiency of our proposed PAD protocol in terms of delivery ratio.