Common friends discovery for multiple parties with friendship ownership and replay-attack resistance in mobile social networks

Social networking sites have emerged as a powerful tool for maintaining contact and sharing information between people, allowing users to quickly and easily communicate and interact over the Internet. However, such services have raised serious privacy concerns, especially in terms of ensuring the security of users’ personal information in the process of data exchange while also allowing for effective and complete data matching. Many studies have examined privacy matching issues and proposed solutions which could be applied to the current private matching issue. However, these solutions are almost entirely based on dual-matching designs. Therefore, this paper proposes a tripartite privacy matching protocol between common friends. In contexts with multiple users, this protocol searches for matching problems for common friends to produce a new solution. This approach does not rely on a trusted third party, and can be used on most mobile devices. In addition to providing outstanding operating performance and effective communication, this approach also accounts for context-specific privacy preservation, mutual authentication, mutual friendship certification, prevention of privacy spoofing and replay attack resistance, allowing users to safely and effectively identify mutual friends. The proposed methods are shown to be secure and efficient, and are implemented in mobile phones that allow users to find common friends securely in seconds. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work done on mobile common friends discovery for three parties with advanced privacy preservation.