Open AccessCONFIDENTIALITY PROTECTIVE USER PROFILE MATCHING IN PUBLIC NETWORKS
Author(s) -
M Mounika,
K. Tulasi Krishna Kumar Nainar
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
epra international journal of research and development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2455-7838
DOI - 10.36713/epra8438
Subject(s) - computer science , elgamal encryption , server , homomorphic encryption , encryption , user profile , matching (statistics) , confidentiality , internet privacy , computer security , service provider , information privacy , public key cryptography , service (business) , information retrieval , world wide web , statistics , mathematics , economy , economics
We consider a scenario where a user queries a user profile database, maintained by a social networking service provider, to identify users whose profiles match the profile specified by the querying user. A typical example of this application is online dating. Most recently, an online dating website, Ashley Madison, was hacked, which results in disclosure of a large number of dating user profiles. This data breach has urged researchers to explore practical privacy protection for user profiles in a social network. Here, we propose a privacy-preserving solution for profile matching in social networks by using multiple servers. Our solution is built on homomorphic encryption and allows a user to find out matching users with the help of multiple servers without revealing to anyone the query and the queried user profiles in clear. Our solution achieves user profile privacy and user query privacy as long as at least one of the multiple servers is honest. Our experiments demonstrate that our solution is practical.KEY WORDS: User profile matching, data privacy protection, ElGamal encryption.