TGIS: Booting Trust for Secure Information Sharing in Dynamic Group Collaborations

Mobile computing has drawn considerable attention because of the various types of mobile devices and services that are becoming available. This paper explores dynamic group collaboration and information sharing with mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets. In particular, we propose trusted group-based information sharing (TGIS), a protocol for mobile devices to establish a trust relationship in order to form group-based information sharing. We exploit existing (group or organizational) identity hierarchies of mobile users to establish trust between group members with hierarchical identity-based encryption (HIBE). In order to control information sharing within a group and between groups, we further leverage attribute-based encryption (ABE) for secure access control, where attribute secret keys are distributed with the trust relationship with HIBE. We have implemented and evaluated TGIS on Android phones, demonstrating its viability.