Buddy List Research Articles

DP5: A Private Presence Service

Abstract Users of social applications like to be notified when their friends are online. Typically, this is done by a central server keeping track of who is online and offline, as well as of all of the users’ “buddy lists”, which contain sensitive information. We present DP5, a cryptographic service that implements online presence indication in a privacy-friendly way. DP5 allows clients to register their online presence and query the presence of their list of friends while keeping this list secret. Besides presence, high-integrity status updates are supported, to facilitate key update and rendezvous protocols. While infrastructure services are required for DP5 to operate, they are designed to not require any long-term secrets and provide perfect forward secrecy in case of compromise. We provide security arguments for the indistinguishability properties of the protocol, as well as an evaluation of its scalability and performance.

Providing Security to the Architecture of Presence Servers

Mobile cloud Computing is a new emerging technology. This technology supports many applications and one such application is presence enabled application. Mobile presence server is the main component in presence enabled applications and they provide presence services to all mobile users in the network. As number of mobile user increases to a great extent there arises buddy list search problem. In-order to solve this problem a scalable server architecture called presence cloud has been introduced. To provide security to the above server architecture SSL protocol is used. The performance is evaluated by using the parameters such as search latency and response time. SSL protocol involves determination and exchange of keys which increases buddy list search delay and response time. Therefore SSL session resumption is used to decrease this searching time and response time.

A Secure Chat Application Based on Pure Peer-to-Peer Architecture

Chat application is increasingly used as an alternative to older communication technologies such as telephony and telegraph. Equipped with advanced features, people can use it for education, business and socialize. Basic requirement for chatting is an ability to exchange text messages, however, recent releases include support for audio and video communications. For some reasons, peer-to-peer now turned out to be a popular architecture and as such, it becomes a choice for developing chat applications such as Skype. Skype however, makes use of centralized server for user registration, login and buddy list. Indeed, this idea could be disastrous in the event of a compromise. In this study, we proposed a chat application that is based on pure peer-to-peer architecture that totally rid of centralized or third party elements. The system is controlled by the users and its security is autonomously managed by the communicating parties. Each user will have their own database for peer's profiles and communication parties authenticate among each other before exchanging messages. The main contribution of this paper is a state-of-the-art chat application having completely been designed with build in security measures.

Subscriber data management in IMS networks

Next-generation communication services will be driven by increasingly rich and distributed subscriber information. Current wireless networks have evolved such that subscriber information now resides in various elements e.g., home location register [HLR], prepay, voice mail, short message, and location determination systems). Convergence with the Internet promises significantly more personal information, such as presence, calendars, address books, buddy lists, pictures, and video. The home subscriber server (HSS) in the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture provides centralized storage for subscriber data. However, some application servers will also have their own subscriber data. As the quantity and variety of applications grow, it will become increasingly useful to provide unified views of subscriber data both within a network and across networks. The Lucent Datagrid™ software provides a telecom-targeted data integration capability, so that applications can use a logical “single-point-of-access” for user profile information inside a service provider's network.

Mobile communities: How viable are their business models? An exemplary investigation of the leisure industry

Communities (especially Virtual Communities) of Interest have been the focus of substantial discussion in academic literature. This paper addresses Communities of Interest within the leisure industry and discusses possible business models for the parties operating the platform. The described community platform is an innovative value added service concept for a mobile coordination support for individuals—A Mobile Community Support System. In this paper we extend the discussion about mobile communities to hybrid communities. The communities are hybrid in two ways: they use two different access channels, the Web and mobile devices, and they are built on real-world leisure communities that constitute themselves in the form of buddy lists in the virtual world of an ICT supported platform. We briefly depict the state of the art of IT in the leisure industry and describe the empirical aspects of the project objectives of the MCOR (Mobile Community Online Reservation) system. We conclude with some final remarks about design considerations and a blueprint for future research.

IM means business

Instant messaging (IM), no longer just a facet of teenage life, now speeds everything from naval operations to customer service. IM is moving from computers and laptops to cellphones, PDAs, and other devices. Through its prosaic buddy list, a continuously updated window that shows who among your family, friends, or colleagues are online and available, IM connects you to your inner circle in ways that phones and e-mail can't. What will make IM more than just the next hot idea to come and go is a single key feature called presence. In essence, this is a protocol to tell the world that you're available on a particular device. Outside IM, presence is being built into collaboration tools, word processors, e-mail directories, and even online games. Being always available has its drawbacks, of course. All too often, work and other obligations spill over into our private time. Many find the prospect of co-workers and even family always being able to contact us daunting. Concentration can be shattered; questions that seem important to the questioner may not be so to you. If usability researchers and application developers get it wrong, presence will be a burden, instead of a benefit. If they get it right, though, if they can deliver the right amount of your availability to the right set of people, IM can become the main way we initiate contact with the people we communicate with most often. indeed, those now-primary forms of communication, the telephone and e-mail, will either have presence built into them, or take a back seat to IM.