Heterogeneous communications enabled by cellular operators

How can secure data communication between two users not knowing each other be achieved? In this paper we show that it is possible to perform such a secured communication using a user friendly setup with help of a cellular network. The main contribution of this paper is to present a secure connection between two users on whatever technology (wireless LAN, Bluetooth, etc) with an easy installation and setup reusing a cellular network. We describe a novel architecture to enable user friendly establishment of a secure communication among mobile devices to share data using different wireless technologies like wireless LAN, Bluetooth, cellular systems or even infrared. Making use of these technology combinations for data transmission and using the cellular network for signaling, we analyze several scenarios with increasing complexity. The complete picture appears in the last scenario where several heterogeneous technologies are involved and the network is composed of heterogeneous mobile nodes. The novelty of our concept is mainly the usage of wireless WAN networks to authenticate users and exchange keys to secure the heterogeneous links between the mobile nodes