A Secure Device and Service Discovery Protocol for Proximity Based Social Networks (PBSNs)

Technical advances of Online Social Networking (OSN) have promoted new types of social interactions such as Proximity Based Social Networking (PBSN) where proximate users interact with each other using their mobile devices. However, personal details users share on these networks are not secured and messages exchanged are prone to different attacks and eavesdropping. Qualcomm introduces AllJoyn, which eases the development of such applications discovering with nearby devices and establishing a secure communication. In this paper, a secure device and service discovery protocol is introduced leveraging the AllJoyn framework. It allows mobile users to perform secure device advertising and discovery, authentication, encryption and decryption of exchanged messages. The security and performance of the proposed architecture are thoroughly analyzed and evaluated by using penetration tools and scenarios. Results showed that exchanged messages could not be captured and the system is not prone to attacks such as man-in-the-middle attacks.