A robust authenticated privacy-preserving attribute matchmaking protocol for mobile social networks

Abstract

The advances in mobile and communication technologies lead to the advancement of mobile social networks (MSNs). MSN changed the way people communicate and exchange the private and sensitive information among the friend groups via mobile phones. Due to the involvement of private and sensitive information, MSN demands for efficient and privacy-preserving matchmaking protocols to prevent the unintended data (attribute) leakage. Many existing matchmaking protocols are based on user’s private and specific data. Malicious participants may opt their attribute set arbitrarily so as to discover more information about the attributes of an honest participant. Hence, there is great chance of information leakage to a dishonest participant. In this context, Sarpong et al. had proposed a first of its kind of an authenticated hybrid matchmaking protocol that will help match-pair initiators to find an appropriate pair which satisfies the predefined threshold number of common attributes. Sarpong et al. had claimed that their protocol restricts attribute leakage to unintended participants and proved to be secure. Unfortunately, in Sarpong et al. scheme, after thorough analysis, we demonstrate that their scheme suffers from data (attribute) leakage in which the initiator and the participant can compute or achieve all the attributes of each other. Also, we show that Sarpong et al. scheme requires huge computation and communication cost. As a part of our contribution, we will propose an efficient and secure matchmaking protocol which is light weight and restricts attribute leakage to the participants.