Secure encounter-based social networks: requirements, challenges, and designs

In this paper we outline requirements, challenges, and designs for encounter-based mobile social networks, where relationships are based on a temporarily shared location. To illustrate the challenges we examine a recently proposed design, SMILE, against a set of functional and security requirements. We show that SMILE is vulnerable to several attacks such as impersonation, collusion, and privacy breaching, even though it was built with the explicit goal of resisting some of those attacks. With this in mind, we construct a flexible framework for secure mobile social networks, and describe how to use it in order to construct several networks which offer somewhat different security properties. Each of the designs is then examined against the ideal requirements where some are shown to outperform previous work.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Abedelaziz Mohaisen, Eugene Y. Vasserman, Max Schuchard, Denis Foo Kune, Yongdae Kim
• Keywords: CCS 2010, Designs, Mobile Social Networks, Requirements, Security Privacy