SEER: A Secure and Efficient Service Review System for Service-Oriented Mobile Social Networks

In this paper, we consider service-oriented mobile social networks (S-MSNs) and propose a Secure and Efficient service Review (SEER) system to enable user feedback. Each service provider independently maintains a SEER system for itself, which collects and stores user reviews about its services without requiring any central trusted authority. The service reviews can then be made available to interested users in making wise service selection decisions. We identify three unique service review attacks and then develop sophisticated security mechanisms for SEER to deal with these attacks. Specifically, SEER enables users to distributedly and cooperatively submit their reviews in an integrated chain form by using hierarchical and aggregate signature techniques. It discourages service providers to reject, modify or delete their reviews. The integrity of reviews is therefore improved. Through security analysis and performance evaluation, we show that SEER effectively resists the service review attacks and achieves significantly better performance in terms of submission rate and delay than a service review system that does not adopt user cooperation or the chain review structure.