Design and Implementation of Splash It!: A Secure and Privacy Preserving Splash Messenger
Nitish Sakhawalkar Nitish Sakhawalkar · IOSR Journal of Computer Engineering · 2013
The main objective of any mobile application or service is to deliver a satisfying experience to its user, since it is the user who eventually decides to keep it or select another application from a plethora of choices.Without doubt, security and privacy both have a crucial role to play when it comes to using the application.Our application blends both these features offering users the ability to chat, share geographic coordinates and make 'Splashes' in real-time.A 'Splash Message' is a new Location-based feature that has been implemented in our application.Splash messaging enables the user to create messages on a virtual notice board at the location of his choice.The intended users will receive this message as soon as they enter this location.Splash It! provides users with the facility of marking their points of interest on the maps and sharing them with their friends.In addition, the user can control his level of privacy by making information available only to certain groups of friends or to all of them.Splash Messaging is our attempt to make existing chat applications more interesting.Currently, many implementations provide some of these features jointly or separately, through different applications, but are found to ignore the users' privacy.Our application on the other hand, provides an acceptable level of security by utilizing both asymmetric and symmetric cryptography, and most importantly, put the user in control of personal information.We discuss several issues here, such as system architecture, security, privacy, services provided by existing applications etc.Using a prototype application implemented in Google's Android platform, we demonstrate that the proposed system is fast performing, secure and privacy preserving.