Security and privacy in mobile social networks: challenges and solutions

Mobile social networking is a pervasive communication platform where users with smartphones can search over the Internet and query neighboring peers to obtain the desired information. In this article, we examine the architecture, communication patterns, and especially the security and privacy of MSN. We first study three categories of mobile applications with a focus on two autonomous mobile applications, business card and service review. We then explore the possible methods to deal with the associated security and privacy challenges. By discussing the shortages of the methods, we finally provide several promising research directions.