Design of Secure Location and Message Sharing System for Android Platform

INTRODUCTION Today’s age is the world of technologies, where lots of inventions and discoveries have made everyone to rely on the use of latest technology. Knowingly or unknowingly we are taking the benefit of the technology. Today one can share information with others using the communication technology. One can know what is happening in different parts of the world within a click. It is possible due to the development in the internet services through which one can share the information with the rest of the world. Internet has brought revolution in the field of communication. One can use internet for various purposes depending upon the nature of work. But the main uses of the internet in these days are sharing of information. The main application of internet is web services where internet plays an important role. Another useful development in the technology is the mobile devices. The use of mobile devices is increasing dayby-day. Many improvements have been made, such as faster processors and better battery life, have enabled notebooks and smartphones to become powerful devices, giving us the ability to completely change the way we work. Today’s mobile devices not only comes with the feature of voice communication and sending/receiving messages but also has the features of Internet, Bluetooth, Image capturing, Video recording, GPS facilities and so on. Various smart phones are available in the market, namely Samsung, HTC, Motorola, Apple iPhone, Android, Blackberry products and so on. Among them, Android has been gaining popularity and its market share in the mobile operating system market is rapidly increasing. According to Gartner (2010) [1], Android is poised to become second worldwide mobile operating system in the nearer future. Using the technology – smart phone and internet, people are sharing information to other people but they are not sure if their information is securely transmitted or not. This paper deals with secure transmission of information with each other. The main drawbacks with the existing android-based location and message sharing systems are as follows: 1) No centralized database due to which there is a problem in management of data, portability problem, updates as well as backup problems etc. 2) Most of the location based social network asks to input the personal information. All the messages are displayed on the screen which has failed to protect the privacy of information. 3) Lack of server centric privacy control method. No security has been maintained during transfer of information between server and device. 4) Most of the application that are based on GPS technology are storing location in their built in database and are unable to use it externally so that it is difficult to trace the current location of the people where they are. The main objective of this paper, on the highest level, is to communicate with a PHP server that stores the information sent through the android device in encrypted form and vice-versa which finally establish a secure two way communication between android device and web server. The main highlight of our work is listed below: 1) Connect with the external database MySQL to maintain a centralized database. For achieving this goal, we will use JSON as an intermediary to send the data from android device and PHP to insert that value to the external database MySQL. 2) Interact with the webserver and maintaining security while sharing location and message. For achieving this goal, we will use two approaches, the information sent by the android application is first stored in a database in encrypted form using JSON and PHP as intermediary and decrypt data while extracting from database. And similar process is followed while sending information from webserver to device. All the data are encrypted while sending and key is needed to decrypt this data before reading from the database. INTRODUCTION Today’s age is the world of technologies, where lots of inventions and discoveries have made everyone to rely on the use of latest technology. Knowingly or unknowingly we are taking the benefit of the technology. Today one can share information with others using the communication technology. One can know what is happening in different parts of the world within a click. It is possible due to the development in the internet services through which one can share the information with the rest of the world. Internet has brought revolution in the field of communication. One can use internet for various purposes depending upon the nature of work. But the main uses of the internet in these days are sharing of information. The main application of internet is web services where internet plays an important role. Another useful development in the technology is the mobile devices. The use of mobile devices is increasing dayby-day. Many improvements have been made, such as faster processors and better battery life, have enabled notebooks and smartphones to become powerful devices, giving us the ability to completely change the way we work. Today’s mobile devices not only comes with the feature of voice communication and sending/receiving messages but also has the features of Internet, Bluetooth, Image capturing, Video recording, GPS facilities and so on. Various smart phones are available in the market, namely Samsung, HTC, Motorola, Apple iPhone, Android, Blackberry products and so on. Among them, Android has been gaining popularity and its market share in the mobile operating system market is rapidly increasing. According to Gartner (2010) [1], Android is poised to become second worldwide mobile operating system in the nearer future. Using the technology – smart phone and internet, people are sharing information to other people but they are not sure if their information is securely transmitted or not. This paper deals with secure transmission of information with each other. The main drawbacks with the existing android-based location and message sharing systems are as follows: 1) No centralized database due to which there is a problem in management of data, portability problem, updates as well as backup problems etc. 2) Most of the location based social network asks to input the personal information. All the messages are displayed on the screen which has failed to protect the privacy of information. 3) Lack of server centric privacy control method. No security has been maintained during transfer of information between server and device. 4) Most of the application that are based on GPS technology are storing location in their built in database and are unable to use it externally so that it is difficult to trace the current location of the people where they are. The main objective of this paper, on the highest level, is to communicate with a PHP server that stores the information sent through the android device in encrypted form and vice-versa which finally establish a secure two way communication between android device and web server.

The main highlight of our work is listed below:

1) Connect with the external database MySQL to maintain a centralized database. For achieving this goal, we will use JSON as an intermediary to send the data from android device and PHP to insert that value to the external database MySQL.

2) Interact with the webserver and maintaining security while sharing location and message. For achieving this goal, we will use two approaches, the information sent by the android application is first stored in a database in encrypted form using JSON and PHP as intermediary and decrypt data while extracting from database. And similar process is followed while sending information from webserver to device. All the data are encrypted while sending and key is needed to decrypt this data before reading from the database.

3) To find the current location, trace the path and track the people. For achieving this goal, current location is obtained from GPS enabled android device and is sent to webserver and webserver will display location position and path on the web using the feature of Google Map.

This paper is organized as follows: section II introduces some background, including Android Platform, PHP and MySQL, JSON and some security measures taken during location and message sharing, section III describes related works, section IV illustrates the design and operation of ALMSS, experiments are performed on section V, section VI finally draws the conclusion and future works.