Trustworthy and effective person-to-person payments over multi-hop MANETs

•We propose a privacy-preserving token-based path discovery protocol for decentralized mobile payment systems exploiting MANET, which allows users to enforce their trust preference before deciding a money transfer.•We propose some optimization strategies to decrease the number of tokensets sent over MANET to improve the network performance.•We prove the efficiency of our protocol in several network configurations.

Due to the rapid development of mobile technologies, nowadays mobile devices are not expensive and almost every person can easily possess a mobile device. This fact boosts investments in mobile applications, among which are the person-to-person mobile payment applications. These applications are pretty sensitive in that they are related to monetary transactions, thus involving strict security and privacy requirements. To this purpose, we propose a secure protocol leveraging online social network connections to help users enforce their trust preferences locally to make a money transfer. The protocol exploits mobile ad-hoc network as a communication means. To improve the network performance by still preserving data security and user privacy, we also propose some optimization strategies to decrease the number of tokensets sent over mobile ad-hoc network. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal.