Autonomic and opportunistic communications require specific routing algorithms, like replication-based algorithms or context-based forwarding. Privacy is a major concern for protocols which disseminate the context of their destination. In this paper, we focus on the privacy issue inherent to context-based protocols, in the framework of an original epidemic forwarding scheme, which uses context as a heuristic to limit the replication of messages. We define the achievable privacy level with respect to the trusted communities assumption, and the security implications. Indeed, privacy in such an environment raises challenging problems, which lead us to a solution based on two refinements of identity-based encryption, namely searchable encryption and policy-based encryption. This new solution enables forwarding while preserving privacy by allowing secure partial matches in the header and by enforcing confidentiality of the payload.
