Message in a Sealed Bottle: Privacy Preserving Friending in Social Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces privacy-preserving mechanisms for finding matching profiles in decentralized mobile social networks, ensuring user privacy while maintaining efficiency and security.

Contribution

It presents novel privacy-preserving search mechanisms that do not expose user profiles and establish secure communication, outperforming existing solutions in efficiency.

Findings

Mechanisms are secure, privacy-preserving, and verifiable.

Significantly more efficient than existing solutions.

Validated through real social network data and smartphone implementation.

Abstract

Many proximity-based mobile social networks are developed to facilitate connections between any two people, or to help a user to find people with matched profile within a certain distance. A challenging task in these applications is to protect the privacy the participants' profiles and personal interests. In this paper, we design novel mechanisms, when given a preference-profile submitted by a user, that search a person with matching-profile in decentralized multi-hop mobile social networks. Our mechanisms are privacy-preserving: no participants' profile and the submitted preference-profile are exposed. Our mechanisms establish a secure communication channel between the initiator and matching users at the time when the matching user is found. Our rigorous analysis shows that our mechanism is secure, privacy-preserving, verifiable, and efficient both in communication and computation. Extensive evaluations using real social network data, and actual system implementation on smart phones show that our mechanisms are significantly more efficient then existing solutions.