SpotShare and nearbyPeople: applications of the Social PaL framework

Abstract

Imagine if there is a privacy-preserving mechanism for two mobile devices to determine if their owners have common friends. It can be useful for access control in applications like ride-sharing, sharing Internet access or even just a simple "people radar" app for showing nearby friends and friends-of-friends. Current mechanisms for doing this come at the cost of revealing these interactions and the users' locations to central servers. In a paper that appears in the WiSec 2015 proceedings, we describe Social Pal [2], a framework that allows privacy-preserving discovery of the distance between two users in a social network. Social Pal was implemented as a general purpose software framework that can be easily used by application developers who wish to incorporate such functionality into their applications.