Abstract
In social networks, the personal attributes or hobbies of the users are exposed to the server to establish the relationships. Service providers may store these information for commercial purpose or statistical analysis. Furthermore, the server may expose to external attacks, which may disclose users' privacy information. In this paper, we present a hierarchical blockchain-based attribute matching scheme, which realizes privacy-preserving attribute matching under multiple semi-trusted servers. The scheme employs CP-ABE and bloom filter to satisfy the requirements of the users to make friend discovery, and reduces the computation cost of users by outsourcing decryption of CP-ABE. Besides, the hierarchical blockchain only implements the consensus and storage of matching results on the blockchain, while the complex calculations and a large amount of data storage are off-chain, which reduces the consumption of the blockchain and improves the operation efficiency. Finally, we prove the scheme can resist single point failure, collusion attack, internal attack and external attack, the experimental results demonstrate the proposed scheme is feasibility and efficiency.
Highlights
Social social networking provides an online platform to people to build social relationships with others, who have similar personal attributes such as age, home address, education background, etc
To solve the problems of friend matching in social network, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving friend matching based on blockchain in social networks
We proposed an attribute matching mechanism based on the hierarchical blockchain and outsourcing Ciphertext Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) for friend discovery in social networks, which can achieve the attribute matching in semi-honest social network platforms and reduce computing consumption of users
Summary
Social social networking provides an online platform to people to build social relationships with others, who have similar personal attributes such as age, home address, education background, etc. Social network platforms may use user attributes for statistical, advertising or profit-making purposes [1], [2] Such behavior will compromise users’ privacy, which affect users’ real life [3], [4]. F. Yang et al.: Efficient Blockchain-Based Bidirectional Friends Matching Scheme are employed to execute the friend discovery. Yang et al.: Efficient Blockchain-Based Bidirectional Friends Matching Scheme are employed to execute the friend discovery These methods either consume massive computing resources or are vulnerable to statistical analysis attacks. We proposed an attribute matching mechanism based on the hierarchical blockchain and outsourcing CP-ABE for friend discovery in social networks, which can achieve the attribute matching in semi-honest social network platforms and reduce computing consumption of users.
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