Privacy-preserving Attribute Matchmaking in Proximity-based Mobile Social Networks

Solomon Sarpong, Chunxiang Xu
2015 International Journal of Security and Its Applications  
The major impediments that mostly arise in matchmaking in mobile social networks are ensuring the privacy of users' attributes, finding the intersection of attributes of the matched-pair without revealing any other information, and ensuring that the matchedpair get to know the intersection mutually. Also, in virtually all the existing protocols, the initiator of the matchmaking does not set a threshold number of common attributes an individual should have with him/her before qualifying as a
more » ... . Hence, we propose a hybrid matchmaking cryptographic protocol that will overcome these impediments. In our proposed protocol, an initiator of matchmaking sets a threshold number of common attributes that an individual should have to qualify as a matching-pair. The protocol also ensures that no information about the intersection set is leaked to persons not in the protocol. To further enhance the security and privacy in the protocol, the attributes of the persons our protocol are authorized. The authorization of the attributes is intended to thwart malicious behavior by the persons in the protocol and hence, prevents semi-honest attacks. Furthermore, in this proposed protocol, persons in the protocol get to know the intersection of their attributes mutually.
doi:10.14257/ijsia.2015.9.5.22 fatcat:uhohipwixvghxm7vwslccxzgse