Universally composable private proximity testing

Abstract

This paper aims at studying privacy-preserving tests for proximity. In a private proximity test, Alice can verify if she is close to Bob without either party revealing any other information about their location. We propose a system for private proximity testing based on the pre-distribution of data: the so-called commodity-based model. Our system is proven secure in the Universal Composability (UC) framework and uses as the core building block an efficient UC-secure equality testing protocol. To our knowledge this is the first work in the literature that contemplates this problem in the UC framework. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.