Mutual Contact Discovery

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mutual contact discovery protocol that enhances privacy by allowing users to discover each other only if they are mutually in each other's contact lists, reducing unwanted notifications and protecting social graph privacy.

Contribution

It proposes a novel mutual contact discovery protocol that improves privacy over traditional methods without relying on trusted hardware.

Findings

Protocol enables mutual contact discovery with privacy guarantees

Reduces unwanted notifications for users

Can be implemented without trusted hardware

Abstract

Contact discovery allows new users of a messaging service to find existing contacts that already use that service. Existing users are similarly informed of new users that join. This creates a privacy issue: anyone already on the service that has your number on their contact list gets notified that you joined. Even if you don't know that person, or if it is an ex or former colleague that you long parted with and whose contact details you deleted long ago. To solve this, we propose a mutual contact discovery protocol, that only allow users to discover each other when both are (still) in each other's contact list. Mutual contact discovery has the additional advantage that it can be implemented in a more privacy friendly fashion (e.g. protecting the social graph from the server) than traditional, one-sided contact discovery, without necessarily relying on trusted hardware.