Secure Encounter-based Mobile Social Networks: Requirements, Designs, and Tradeoffs

ABSTRACT Mobile social networking is social networking where individuals with similar interests converse and connect with one another through their mobile phone and/or tablet. Much like web-based social networking, mobile social networking occurs in virtual communities. A current trend for social networking websites, such as facebook, is to create mobile apps to give their users instant and real-time access from their device. Encounter-based social networks and encounterbased systems link users who share a location at the same time, as opposed to the traditional social network paradigm of linking users who have an offline friendship. In this paper, we explore the functional and security requirements for these new systems, such as availability, security, and privacy, and present several design options for building secure encounterbased social networks. To highlight these challenges we examine one recently proposed encounter-based social network design and compare it to a set of idealized security and functionality requirements. We also evaluate real-world performance of one of our designs by implementing a proofof- concept iPhone application called meet up. Experiments highlight the potential of our system and hint at the deployability of our designs on a large scale.