An Efficient Privacy-Preserving Bidirectional Friends Matching Scheme in Mobile Social Networks

In recent years, mobile social networks, which combine mobile communication and Internet technology, have developed rapidly and gradually become an indispensable part of people's daily life. In addition to sharing their own dynamics, users in mobile social networks also hope to find some new friends with the same interests through some attribute matching strategies. In view of this requirement and the implicit problem of protecting user privacy, this paper combines the idea of Matchmaking Encryption which is a new cryptographic primitive and of attribute-base encryption with outsourcing, and proposes an efficient and secure bidirectional friends matching scheme. Under the condition of protecting the privacy of users' secret attributes and matching strategies, the scheme enables both parties to make their own matching policies, thus achieving the goal that both parties can match to their expected new friends. In addition, the security and efficiency of the scheme are analyzed, and its feasibility is proved.