Privacy Preserving Decentralized Identity Validation for Geo-social Networks over MANET

Abstract

Mobile phones, and more specifically smart gadgets, have known a rapid proliferation over the past years in terms of their adoption and usage. Their prices have also known noticeable declines making the ownership of a smart-phone at the ability of all pocket sizes. This has created tremendous potential for the design and creation of services that users can consume through their smart-phones and that would improve their daily lives tasks. In this work, we focus on the potential of using smart-phones in geographically bounded areas, such as shopping malls, museums, conference venues, etc, to establish collaborative ad-hoc networks over MANET. These networks are meant to allow for the provision of P2P exchange of information and help between visitors of such places to improve their visiting experience. We discuss how such a network could be designed and we focus on two main challenges: 1. identity validation over the network to ensure the worthiness of provided information, and 2. privacy preservation both against personal information inference from provided information and over the p2p overlay.