Serial number based encryption and its application for mobile social networks

Security and privacy is a prerequisite for the development of mobile networking in big data era. However, security scheme usually demands complex and inefficient implementation. One interesting difference between mobile social networks (MSNs) and web-based social networks is that: user in MSNs is identified by a bunch of serial numbers, while in traditional web-based social network, is identified by arbitrarily strings. Two obvious examples are the phone number in mobile networks and the license number in vehicular ad hoc networks. Taking advantage of this minor difference, we develop a lightweight functional public key encryption scheme and demonstrate its applications for mobile networks. We call such a scheme the Serial Number Based Encryption (SNBE). Our scheme is provable secure base on the DBDH assumption in the standard model, while the ciphertext consists of only three elements.