NMHP: A privacy preserving profile matching protocol in multi-hop proximity mobile social networks

Abstract

With the rapid development of mobile devices and online social networks, users in Proximity-based Mobile Social Networks (PMSNs) can easily discover and make new social interactions with others by profile matching. The profiles usually contain sensitive personal information, while the emerging requirement of profile matching in proximity mobile social networks may occasionally leak the sensitive information and hence violate people’s privacy. In this paper, we propose a multi-hop profile matching protocol (NMHP) in PMSNs. By using our protocol, users can customize the matching matrices to involve their own matching preference and to make the matching results more precise. In addition, to achieve a secure and efficient matching, we utilize the con- fusion matrix transformation and the idea of multi-hop, which means we make profile matching within several hops instead one. Security analysis shows that our proposed protocol can realize privacy-preserving friend discovery with higher efficiency.