Efficient private matching based on blind signature for proximity-based mobile social networks

Proximity-based mobile social networks (PMSNs) are becoming increasingly popular due to the explosive growth of mobile devices in recent years, where a user can find a best matching friend within a nearby proximity through profile matching. However, the matching process calls for the exchange of users´ personal information, which conflicts with their growing privacy concerns on revealing their profiles to strangers. Although a few methods have been proposed to achieve privacy-preserving friend discovery, most of them introduce tremendous communication overhead to the system so that they are not practical for resource-limited mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a private matching scheme based on blind signature for PMSNs, which can achieve a fine-grained matching and preferably protect users´ privacy without relying on any Trusted Third Party (TTP). Moreover, our scheme can significantly reduce the communication overhead even when working as a group matching mode. Security analysis and detailed simulations show that the proposed scheme can achieve efficient privacy-preserving friend discovery.