Veri-Card: An interpersonal relationship verification system on mobile phones

Social networking applications running on mobile phones help people to keep in touch with their existing contacts and promote the formation of new relationships among people. However, many of such applications do not have a secure mechanism to verify interpersonal relationships in social networks. To address this problem, a prior work has presented a scheme that can conduct the verification only within the range of Bluetooth, which greatly constrains the verification scenarios it can support. In this paper, we propose Veri-Card, a new system that leverages Wi-Fi for relationship verification. By extending the range over which the verification takes place, our system not only frees the verifier from staying close, but also supports simpler and more natural verification scenario. We have implemented and evaluated the system on the real-world devices. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of verifying relationships using Veri-Card via Wi-Fi. The system achieves the average relationship verification time of around 26 ms and the contact discovery time of no more than 4 seconds in most cases.