Flexible Communication: A Secure and Trust-Based Free Wi-Fi Password Sharing Service

During the last few years the amount of users with mobile devices (laptops, smartphones, tablets, etc.) with wireless connectivity capabilities has grown at an impressive rate. In the meantime, the number of Wi-Fi networks has also increased a lot, and in addition to this, the emergence and fast growth of applications such as social networking, user generated content, location services, collaborative tools and applications, etc. has fueled the user´s need for permanent connectivity. This paper introduces Flexible Communication, a secure and trust-based Wi-Fi password sharing service. Our service architecture provides the user with a solution that enables free Wi-Fi network password sharing, which relies on a social-networking oriented trust model approach and which at the same time allows the user to locate and to connect to those Wi-Fi networks at any time. We validate our solution with a qualitative assessment which compares its features against those of the other similar existent solutions and also with a quantitative assessment which measures the performance both of the server and the client.