A Privacy-Preserving and Trusted Social Relationship Similarity Detection Protocol in Mobile Social Networks

In mobile social networks, unfamiliar users can decide whether to establish new social relationships between each other by examining whether they have common friends. The biggest challenge during this process is how to protect the users' privacy and prevent users from forging friend relationships. In order to address this challenge, a common friends detection method based on identity-based encryption technology is presented in this paper. In our method, a new evidence of friend relationship is designed, which can establishes a one-to-one relationship between the issuer of evidence and the owner of evidence. Based on the evidence, a privacy-preserving and trusted common friends detection protocol is designed. We provide thorough security analysis and performance evaluation on our scheme.