A secure mobile social network

Sammanfattning: Mobile social networks are a new trend to improve the quality of our life, so they should not bring any extra burden to users. The users should not anymore be worried how to set up a secure complex password and memorize it to prove their identities. The Generic Bootstrapping Architecture is used in this thesis as a novel way of authentication. The GBA protocol allows to generate and share cryptographic keys between a mobile phone and third party service providers using the operator  as intermediary. These keys are generated transparently without any user interaction. In a traditional mobile social network, an Internet connection is compulsory but we believe this should not be a barrier in the future. An ad-hoc network may be used to communicate in a private group of friends. Thus, users need to be capable of verifying membership assertions and generating offline invitations for new friends without a connection to the social network server. Our implementation uses SAML assertions to certify group memberships and offline invitations. Beside these security solutions, a real mobile social network has been implemented, using the REST framework for communication and databases for storing information both on the client and the social network server.