Secure Identification in Social Wireless Networks

Social networks are well established on the Internet and moving into the mobile space by incorporating mobile features such as geo-location, short messaging, multimedia message among others. Trends indicate that mobile social networks would rapidly adopt new wireless features such as upcoming direct-mode and proximity services that assume some sort close physical presence and human interaction. However, social networks users have been affected due to serious security and privacy deficiencies. Such incidents shouldn’t happen in mobile social networks since mobile networks/handsets are known to be trusted by users and so should continue being. This project addresses how to improve existing and upcoming mobile key exchange mechanisms to secure social networking interactions (secure identification). In particular, the project addresses privacy preserving identification based on novel key exchange methods for direct (peer to peer) wireless key exchange between mobile terminals.

This thesis project is done in co-operation with SonyEricsson Mobile Communications in Lund.