This paper presents a secure communication application called DiscoverFriends. Its purpose is to securely communicate to a group of online friends while bypassing their respective social networking servers under a mobile ad hoc network environment. DiscoverFriends leverages Bloom filters and a hybrid encryption technique with a self‐organized public‐key management scheme to securely identify friends and provide authentication. Additionally, DiscoverFriends enables anonymous location check‐ins by utilizing a new cryptographic primitive called function secret sharing. Finally, to the best of our knowledge, DiscoverFriends implements and evaluates the first Android multi‐hop WiFi direct protocol using IPv6. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.