LoCast: Towards a Social Network of Public Hotspots

An increasingly large amount of public WiFi hotspots is being deployed by telecom operators in residential areas. Whilst these are merely used to provide customers with Internet access, we also see an opportunity to exploit public hotspots as distributed nodes for sharing content with locally connected devices. We present a solution allowing ordinary people to share text and media in a geographical area rather than publishing it on the World Wide Web. We make this content only available to hotspots within the selected region and for a given duration, hence preserving privacy by restricting access to content based on location and time. Moreover, we present an architecture for generating secure location proofs, leveraging public hotspots as trusted witnesses.