Speaker: Yan Michalevsky (Stanford)
Title: MASHaBLE: Mobile Applications of Secret Handshakes over Bluetooth LE
Abstract: We present new applications for cryptographic secret hand- shakes between mobile devices on top of Bluetooth Low- Energy (LE). Secret handshakes enable mutual authentication, with the property that the parties learn nothing about each other unless they have been both issued credentials by a group administrator. This property provides strong privacy guarantees that enable interesting applications. One of them is proximity-based messaging for private communities.We introduce MASHaBLE, a mobile application that enables participants to send messages to nearby users if and only if they belong to the same secret community. We use direct peer-to-peer communication over Bluetooth LE, rather than relying on a central server. We discuss the specifics of implementing secret handshakes over Bluetooth LE and present our prototype implementation.