Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Secure friend discovery based on encounter history in mobile social networks

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Mobile social networking becomes increasingly popular with the explosive growth of mobile devices. By allowing mobile users to interact with potential friends around the real world, it enables new social interactions as a complement to Web-based online social networks. In this paper, we introduce a secure friend discovery mechanism based on encounter history in mobile social networks. By exploring the fact that sharing encounters indicate common activities and interests, our scheme can help people make friends with like-minded strangers nearby. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to take advantage of the encounter history in friend discovery. We provide peer-to-peer confidential communications with the location privacy and encounter privacy being strictly preserved. Unlike most existing works that either rely on a trusted centralized server or existing social relationships, our algorithm is designed in an ad hoc model with no such limitation. As a result, our design is more suitable and more general for mobile social scenarios. Extensive theoretical analysis and experimental study are conducted, and the results indicate that our scheme is feasible and effective for privacy-preserving friend discovery in mobile social networks.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Lin K-Y, Lu H-P (2015) Predicting mobile social network acceptance based on mobile value and social influence. Internet Res 25(1):107–130

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Wei P-S, Lu H-P (2014) Why do people play mobile social games? An examination of network externalities and of uses and gratifications. Internet Res 24(3):313–331

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  3. Li M, Zhu H, Gao Z, Chen S, Yu L, Hu S, Ren K (2014) All your location are belong to us: Breaking mobile social networks for automated user location tracking. In: Proceedings of the 15th ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking and computing. ACM, pp 43–52

  4. Liang X, Lin X, Shen XS (2014) Enabling trustworthy service evaluation in service-oriented mobile social networks. IEEE Trans Parallel Distrib Syst 25(2):310–320

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Wang S, Liu M, Cheng X, Li Z, Huang J, Chen B (2013) Opportunistic routing in intermittently connected mobile p2p networks. IEEE J Sel Areas Commun 31(9):369–378

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Wang S, Wang X, Huang J, Bie R, Cheng X (2014) Analyzing the potential of mobile opportunistic networks for big data applications. In: IEEE network magazine

  7. LaMarca A, Chawathe Y, Consolvo S, Hightower J, Smith I, Scott J, Sohn T, Howard J, Hughes J, Potter F et al (2005) Place lab: device positioning using radio beacons in the wild. In: Gellerson H-W, Want R, Schmidt A (eds) Pervasive computing. Springer, pp 116–133

  8. Wang S, Wang X, Cheng X, Huang J, Bie R (2014) The tempo-spatial information dissemination properties of mobile opportunistic networks with lévy mobility. In: Distributed computing systems (ICDCS), 2014 IEEE 34th international conference on. IEEE, pp 124–133

  9. Cox LP, Dalton A, Marupadi V (2005) Presence-exchanges: toward sustainable presence-sharing. In: Mobile computing systems and applications, 2006. IEEE, pp 55–60

  10. Lin Z, Kune DF, Hopper N (2012) Efficient private proximity testing with gsm location sketches. In: Keromytis AD (ed) Financial cryptography and data security. Springer, pp 73–88

  11. Liang X, Zhang K, Shen X, Lin X (2014) Security and privacy in mobile social networks: challenges and solutions. IEEE Wirel Commun 21(1):33–41

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Zhang K, Liang X, Shen X, Lu R (2014) Exploiting multimedia services in mobile social networks from security and privacy perspectives. IEEE Commun Mag 52(3):58–65

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Manweiler J, Scudellari R, Cox LP (2009) Smile: encounter-based trust for mobile social services. In: Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on computer and communications security. ACM, pp 246–255

  14. Loopt, Inc. your social compass–loopt. http://www.loopt.com

  15. Google Mobile Latitude. http://www.google.com/latitude/

  16. Story L, Stone B (2007) Facebook retreats on online tracking. The New York Times 30

  17. Leyden J (2006) Teen hack suspects charged over facebook clone extortion bid. The Register, pp 05–25

  18. McCarthy M (2007) How Facebook employees break into your profile

  19. Gruteser M, Grunwald D (2003) Anonymous usage of location-based services through spatial and temporal cloaking. In: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on mobile systems, applications and services. ACM, pp 31–42

  20. Kalnis P, Ghinita G, Mouratidis K, Papadias D (2007) Preventing location-based identity inference in anonymous spatial queries. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 19(12):1719–1733

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Gedik B, Liu L (2008) Protecting location privacy with personalized k-anonymity: architecture and algorithms. IEEE Trans Mob Comput 7(1):1–18

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Xu T, Cai Y (2009) Feeling-based location privacy protection for location-based services. In: Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on computer and communications security. ACM, pp 348–357

  23. Gedik B, Liu L (2005) Location privacy in mobile systems: a personalized anonymization model. In: Distributed computing systems, 2005. ICDCS 2005. Proceedings of 25th IEEE international conference on. IEEE, pp 620–629

  24. Hoh B, Gruteser M, Xiong H, Alrabady A (2007) Preserving privacy in GPS traces via uncertainty-aware path cloaking. In: Proceedings of the 14th ACM conference on computer and communications security. ACM, pp 161–171

  25. Chow R, Golle P (2009) Faking contextual data for fun, profit, and privacy. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM workshop on privacy in the electronic society. ACM, pp 105–108

  26. Krishnamurthy B, Wills CE (2009) On the leakage of personally identifiable information via online social networks. In: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM workshop on online social networks. ACM, pp 7–12

  27. Qiu D, Boneh D, Lo S, Enge P (2009) Robust location tag generation from noisy location data for security applications. In: The institute of navigation international technical meeting. Citeseer

  28. Qiu D, Lo S, Enge P, Boneh D, Peterson B (2007) Geoencryption using loran. In: The institute of navigation international technical meeting

  29. Maurer UM (1993) Secret key agreement by public discussion from common information. IEEE Trans Inf Theory 39(3):733–742

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  30. Ahlswede R, Csiszar I (1993) Common randomness in information theory and cryptography. Part I. Secret sharing. IEEE Trans Inf Theory 39(4):1121–1132

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  31. Halevi T, Saxena N (2010) On pairing constrained wireless devices based on secrecy of auxiliary channels: the case of acoustic eavesdropping. In: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on computer and communications security. ACM, pp 97–108

  32. Jiang T, Wang HJ, Hu Y-C (2007) Preserving location privacy in wireless lans. In: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on mobile systems, applications and services. ACM, pp 246–257

  33. Greenstein B, McCoy D, Pang J, Kohno T, Seshan S, Wetherall D (2008) Improving wireless privacy with an identifier-free link layer protocol. In: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on mobile systems, applications, and services. ACM, pp 40–53

  34. Mathur S, Trappe W, Mandayam N, Ye C, Reznik A (2008) Radio-telepathy: extracting a secret key from an unauthenticated wireless channel. In: Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on mobile computing and networking. ACM, pp 128–139

  35. Rappaport T (2001) Wireless communications: principles and practice. Prentice Hall PTR, New Jersey

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  36. Maurer UM (1992) A universal statistical test for random bit generators. J cryptol 5(2):89–105

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation of the USA under Grants CNS-1162057 and CNS-1265311, and the National Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars of China (Grant No. 61225010), NSFC under Grants 61272417, 61173160, 61173161, 61173162, and 61103234.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, 20052, USA

    Hongjuan Li & Xiuzhen Cheng

  2. School of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Yingwen Chen

  3. School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, China

    Keqiu Li

  4. Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD, USA

    Dechang Chen

Authors
  1. Hongjuan Li
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Yingwen Chen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Xiuzhen Cheng
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Keqiu Li
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Dechang Chen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hongjuan Li.

Additional information

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences or the Department of Defense.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Li, H., Chen, Y., Cheng, X. et al. Secure friend discovery based on encounter history in mobile social networks. Pers Ubiquit Comput 19, 999–1009 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-015-0873-9

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-015-0873-9

Keywords

Search

Navigation