Privacy-preserving multi-hop profile-matching protocol for proximity mobile social networks

Proximity-based mobile social networks (PMSNs) enable users to easily discover and foster social interactions with others through user-profile matching. The user profiles in PMSNs contain sensitive personal information and an occasional leak will violate people's privacy. Hence, it is a major concern. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving multi-hop profile-matching protocol for PMSNs. The proposed protocol allows users to customize their own matching preference and to make the matching results more precise. Unlike the state-of-the-art profile matching approaches that focus only within a single-hop, the proposed approach makes profile matching within several hops. Moreover, analysis of the security and performance indicates that the proposed protocol achieves secure and privacy-preserving friend discovery with higher efficiency. It executes in less time and consumes less energy than other related protocols.