Privacy Preservation for Friend-Recommendation Applications

AbstractFriend-recommendation applications as one kind of typical social applications can satisfy the social contact needs of different users and become tools for developing a social relationship. However, the privacy leakage has turned into an insurmountable obstacle to the market success of such applications. Existing privacy protection approaches for social applications either introduce untrusted third parties or sacrifice information accuracy. As for friend-recommendation applications particularly, the multihop trust chain and anonymous message methods still have a defect that the hacker can act as a user to acquire information. In this paper, we put forward the privacy protection mechanism based on zero knowledge without any privacy leakage to the application server. In detail, the server knows nothing about the user’s information, but can still provide users with accurate information on friend recommendation. We also analyze the potential attack methods and propose the corresponding solution. Our simulation results verify the effectivity and efficiency of our scheme.