SecureWear: A framework for securing mobile social networks

Abstract

With the rising popularity of social networks, people have started accessing social networking sites from anywhere, any time, and from a variety of devices. Exploiting this ubiquity, the social networking data of an individual can be coupled with her geographical location to build different context aware applications. However, the existing infrastructure to share this personalized data forces users to compromise their privacy. In this paper, we present a secure framework, which allows interaction of social network information with location-based services, without compromising user privacy and security. Through exchanging an encrypted nonce ID (EID) associated with a verified user location, our framework allows location-based services to query its vicinity for relevant information without disclosing user identity. We further argue that, this kind of framework should be adopted as a common security framework for mobile-social interaction to meet privacy requirements. © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2012.