Second Degree Social Connections - Research on Friend-Matching Privacy Preserving Model in Mobile Social Networks

Abstract

With the development of smart terminals and mobile social networks, users can find potential friends who have similar interests by sharing personal attribute profile in mobile social networks (MSN). However, the personal attribute profile usually contains sensitive information, and if this information is captured by attackers, it may cause unexpected consequences. So, in this paper we proposed a Second Degree Social Connections scheme, second degree social connection refers to the “familiar strangers” that you see but do not know every day from the circle of acquaintances in our daily life, friends of friends are in the social circle, etc. In this relationship, make friends matching can build trust relationship with each other.,,,, The scheme uses Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) and Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMC) techniques to guarantee that the attacker fails to get the real information of user's attribute profile, so the personal privacy can be protected during friend matching process. Finally, security analysis shows that the proposed scheme can protect the user's privacy effectively.