Arke: Scalable and Byzantine Fault Tolerant Privacy-Preserving Contact Discovery

Abstract

Contact discovery is a crucial component of social applications, facilitating interactions between registered contacts. This work introduces Arke, a novel contact discovery scheme that addresses the limitations of existing solutions in terms of privacy, scalability, and reliance on trusted third parties. Arke ensures the unlinkability of user interactions, mitigates enumeration attacks, and operates without single points of failure or trust. Notably, Arke is the first contact discovery system whose performance is independent of the total number of users and the first that can operate in a Byzantine setting. It achieves its privacy goals through an unlinkable handshake mechanism built on top of an identity-based non-interactive key exchange. By leveraging a custom distributed architecture, Arke forgoes the expense of consensus to achieve scalability while maintaining consistency in an adversarial environment. Performance evaluations demonstrate that Arke provides a throughput of over 1,500 user requests per second at a latency of less than 0.5 seconds in a large geo-distributed setting which would allow privacy-preserving contact discovery for all of the popular messaging applications in one system.