The power of Snowball is that uses Bluetooth to identificate people being close, and other technologies as MMS or SMS to send the contents. Here’s an explanation of how the communication works:
1. Bluetooth is used to locate mobile phones nearby (radius of action is max 100 metres), so it must be activated before starting Snowball. It’s basilar for the application working beacuse continously tracks the distance between the device in use and the others.
2. When two Bluetooth phones start a connection they request and send mutually data that identify themselves among the others. In our images the explaination has been limitated only to those data which are basilar for Snowball working. If you want to see it in deatil, take a look here.
3. Bluetooth technology is used just to located other users, but for sending snowballs we preferred to use versatile technologies like MMS (for multimedia files) and SMS (for text messages). To use them, you must require a phone number which cannot be given via Bluetooth: it is provided by a server database which collects all the associations Bluetooth ID-phone number and which is contacted by SMS.
4. Once the mobile has recieved the phone number from the central server via SMS, it stores all the data collected until now into associating them to the snowball attack file of the respective user.
5. Now that all the data are stored (all the previous steps are done in a short-time), the snowball attack can be sent.
6. Meanwhile, also the other mobile has requested the ID via Bluetooth, and did the same process to retrieve the necessary data (so think that the process is made mutually by the two devices). When the snowball attack is arrived, it associates to it all the data about the sender.
7. If a user want to send a snowball, he has before to select the recipient. So after selecting the fies to send, the system automatically search in memory for the right phone number and then sends the content via MMS.
8. Snowball is sent via MMS or SMS
