Social-Chain

Pervasive Social Networking (PSN) supports online and instant social activities with the support of heterogeneous networks. Since reciprocal activities among both familiar/unfamiliar strangers and acquaintances are quite common in PSN, it is essential to offer trust information to PSN users. Past work normally evaluates trust based on a centralized party, which is not feasible due to the dynamic changes of PSN topology and its specific characteristics. The literature still lacks a decentralized trust evaluation scheme in PSN. In this article, we propose a novel blockchain-based decentralized system for trust evaluation in PSN, called Social-Chain. Considering mobile devices normally lack computing resources to process cryptographic puzzle calculation, we design a lightweight consensus mechanism based on Proof-of-Trust (PoT), which remarkably improves system effectivity compared with other blockchain systems. Serious security analysis and experimental results further illustrate the security and efficiency of Social-Chain for being feasibly applied into PSN.