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

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 a matched profile within a certain distance. A challenging task in these applications is to protect the privacy of the participants' profiles and personal interests. In this paper, we design novel mechanisms, when given a preference-profile submitted by a user, that search persons with matching-profile in decentralized multi-hop mobile social networks. Our mechanisms also 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 privacy-preserving (no participants' profile and the submitted preference-profile are exposed), verifiable (both the initiator and the unmatched user cannot cheat each other to pretend to be matched), and efficient in both 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 than existing solutions.