A traceable and revocable decentralized multi-authority privacy protection scheme for social metaverse

• Published in: Journal of systems architecture Vol. 140; p. 102899
• Main Authors: Zhang, Shaobo, Wang, Yuechao, Luo, Entao, Liu, Qin, Gu, Ke, Wang, Guojun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.07.2023
• Subjects: Decentralized multi-authority; Intelligent identification of close friends; Revocation; Social metaverse; Traceability; Traceability; Intelligent identification of close friends; Decentralized multi-authority; Social metaverse; Revocation
• ISSN: 1383-7621; 1873-6165
• DOI: 10.1016/j.sysarc.2023.102899

Intelligent identification of close friends is the mainstream approach to protect users’ multi-dimensional data in the social metaverse. It provides a fine-grained matching service for users. However, users enjoy these benefits at the cost of leaking personal multi-dimensional data. The existing social metaverse-based intelligent identification of close friends privacy protection models typically use centralized mechanisms. This will limit users’ control over their data and make them vulnerable to privacy leakage and data misuse. To address these problems, this paper proposes a traceable and revocable decentralized multi-authority privacy protection scheme (TRDM) for social metaverse. The scheme establishes multiple authority centers based on users’ multi-dimensional data, overcoming single point of failure and performance bottlenecks. In addition, TRDM partially hides access policies and supports multi-dimensional attribute access control in social metaverse environment. By introducing leaf node values of binary trees, TRDM achieves the traceability and completes the revocation of malicious users by updating part of the ciphertext. Security analysis and experiments show that TRDM satisfies the requirement of static security under the random prediction model and has better performance in the revocation of malicious users. •We propose a new TRDM approach to safeguard users’ multi-dimensional data and offer fine-grained matching services.•We use a decentralized multi-authority system to reduce single point of failure and eliminate performance bottlenecks.•We bind user identity information and the decryption key together to enable the tracking of malicious users.•We complete the revocation of malicious users by partially updating the ciphertext.