Efficient privacy preserving matchmaking for mobile social networking

Discovering new friends who share common attributes, named as matchmaking, is one of the most popular applications in mobile social networking. The key security issue in matchmaking is to protect users' personal information. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy preserving matchmaking framework, which can help users to find new friends in mobile social networking without leaking their privacy information. A user (called initiator) can find the one who shares maximum number of common attributes with him (called best match) among nearby users (called candidates), and only exchange an attribute intersection set with the best match, while other candidates only know the size of the attribute intersection set mutually. The analysis and simulation results show that our protocol can resist both semi-honest and malicious attacks while providing efficient matchmaking functionality. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.