Towards Privacy Preserving Commutative Encryption-Based Matchmaking in Mobile Social Network

The last decade or so has witnessed a sharp rise in the growth of mobile devices. These mobile devices and wireless communication technologies enable people around the globe to instantaneously communicate with each other. This leads to the emergence of a new type of social networking known as Mobile Social Network (MSN). MSN offers a wide range of useful applications, such as group text services, social gaming, location-based services (to name a few). One of the popular applications of MSN is matchmaking where people match their interests/hobbies to find the like-minded people for a possible friendship. However, revealing personal hobbies can pose significant threats on a user’s privacy. Therefore, a privacy preserving evaluation method is needed to find the similarity between users’ interests. There are various techniques to achieve privacy preserving matchmaking, such as commutative encryption, oblivious transfer and homomorphic encryption. This paper discusses the feasibility of commutative encryption by evaluating recently proposed schemes. The paper attempts to identify various shortcomings in the present work and discusses future directions.