Pervasive social networking (PSN) supports instant social activities anywhere and at any time with the support of heterogeneous networks, where privacy preservation is a crucial issue. One of the effective methods to achieve privacy preservation is anonymous authentication on trust. However, few literatures pay attention to it. In this paper, we propose an anonymous authentication scheme based on group signature for authenticating trust levels rather than identities of nodes in order to avoid privacy leakage and guarantee secure communications in PSN. The scheme achieves secure anonymous authentication with anonymity and conditional traceability with the support of a trusted authority (TA). We also provide a mechanism to guarantee communications among nodes when TA is not available for some nodes. In addition, the utilization of batch signature verification further improves the efficiency of authenticity verification on a large number of messages. Performance analysis and evaluation further prove that the proposed scheme is effective with regard to privacy preservation, computation complexity, communication cost, flexibility, reliability, and scalability.
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