Transparently secure smartphone-based social networking

In social networking, the users´ friends are dynamically distributed all over the world and served by many nontrusted and independent providers, thus it is hard to explicitly set-up their public keys with the conventional Public Key Infrastructure so as to provide secure social networking. The present paper aims to build transparently secure channels for social networking. It employs identity-based encryption schemes to enable secure communication with legacy social networking applications based on the users´ identities such as telephone numbers. In other words, by stealthily injecting the identity-based security function into the existing social networking applications, a user can securely send the messages with the (insecure) applications. The experiments on the instant communication with Android smartphones demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency.