A Privacy-Preserving Friend Matching Scheme Based on Attribute Encryption in Mobile Social Networks

• Published in: Electronics (Basel) Vol. 13; no. 11; p. 2175
• Main Authors: Yu, Li, Nan, Xingxing, Niu, Shufen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.06.2024
• Subjects: Access control; Algorithms; Analysis; Data encryption; Electronic devices; Encryption; Information sharing; Investment analysis; Matching; Mobile devices; Outsourcing; Performance evaluation; Privacy; Social aspects; Social networks; Software; Canada
• ISSN: 2079-9292; 2079-9292
• DOI: 10.3390/electronics13112175

In mobile social networks, users can easily communicate with others through smart devices. Therefore, the protection of user privacy in social networks is becoming a significant subject. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a fine-grained data access control scheme that uses attributes to match friends. In our scheme, the friend-making parties generate friend preference and self-description lists, respectively, realizing attribute hiding by converting friendship preference into ciphertext access control policies and self-description into attribute keys. The social platform matches user profiles to quickly eliminate unmatched users and avoids invalid decryption. In order to reduce the computational burden and communication cost of mobile devices, we adopt an algorithm mechanism for outsourcing decryption. When the user meets the matching conditions, the algorithm outsources the bilinear pair operation with large computation to the friend server. After that, the user finally decrypts the ciphertext. Security analysis shows that our scheme is safe and effective. In addition, performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme is efficient and practical.