9 th Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology Medellín, Colombia WE1-1 August 3-5, 2011 Ninth LACCEI Latin American and Caribbean Conference (LACCEI’2011), Engineering for a Smart Planet, Innovation, Information Technology and Computational Tools for Sustainable Development, August 3-5, 2011, Medellín, Colombia. Secure location-based service for social networks Carolina Marin Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL 33431, cmarin8@fau.edu Eduardo B. Fernandez Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL 33431, ed@cse.fau.edu Maria M. Larrondo Petrie Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL 33431, petrie@fau.edu ABSTRACT Nowadays, the rapid growth of social networks using mobile personal devices has resulted in the use of location- based services for different purposes. Applications such as Geo-tagging are now very popular in smart phones. However, current models for exchange of this information may require users to yield some of their privacy and security unless we use secure ways to protect their location information. We present here a pattern that describes how a user can find his friends using location-based services in a secure way. 1. INTRODUCTION Social network sites attract millions of people on the internet and many of these people have integrated these sites into their daily life. The widespread use of cellular telephones and the availability of user location information are facilitating personalized location-based applications. They are part of a new suite of emerging social networking tools that run on the Web 2.0 platform. Location-based services offer users the ability to look up the location of a friend using a smart phone, desktop, or other device, anytime and anywhere. Mobile devices with geo-positioning capabilities are becoming cheaper and more popular. By sharing their location information (e.g., via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or GPRS), mobile users have available a variety of location based services. An interesting type of such services is a friend-locator service, which shows users their friends’ locations on a map and helps identify nearby friends. Friend locators together with other mobile social networking services are predicted to become a multi-billion dollar industry over the next few years. Several friend-locator services, such as iPoki, Google Latitude, and Fire Eagle are already available. Also, social networks sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr have applications that use location-based services (Brooker, D. et al., 2010). Although, location-based services are popular among social network users there are several privacy and security problems that should be considered. Strangers can get this information easily through the social network platform due to their lack of security. To use location-based services users should define what they want to share and what they want to hide, and their wishes should be enforced by the system (Yiu, M. L. et al., 2010). We present here a pattern that allows people to know the location of other people (friends), who have agreed on this contact. In Section 2 we describe our pattern, and Section 3 presents some conclusions and indicates our future work.