SMILE: encounter-based trust for mobile social services

  • Authors:

  • Justin Manweiler;Ryan Scudellari;Landon P. Cox

  • Affiliations:

  • Duke University, Durham, NC, USA;Duke University, Durham, NC, USA;Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Conventional mobile social services such as Loopt and Google Latitude rely on two classes of trusted relationships: participants trust a centralized server to manage their location information and trust between users is based on existing social relationships. Unfortunately, these assumptions are not secure or general enough for many mobile social scenarios: centralized servers cannot always be relied upon to preserve data confidentiality, and users may want to use mobile social services to establish new relationships. To address these shortcomings, this paper describes SMILE, a privacy-preserving "missed-connections" service in which the service provider is untrusted and users are not assumed to have pre-established social relationships with each other. At a high-level, SMILE uses short-range wireless communication and standard cryptographic primitives to mimic the behavior of users in existing missed-connections services such as Craigslist: trust is founded solely on anonymous users' ability to prove to each other that they shared an encounter in the past. We have evaluated SMILE using protocol analysis, an informal study of Craigslist usage, and experiments with a prototype implementation and found it to be both privacy-preserving and feasible.