Privacy-Preserving Context-Aware Friend Discovery Based on Mobile Sensing

With the advancement of smart phones, wearable devices and communication technologies, it becomes very convenient to obtain various types of data through mobile sensing, where data can be sensed via embedded sensors, stored, processed, and transmitted to anywhere. Mobile sensing has been studied extensively in both academy and industry, and has been applied in many novel applications in the past few years, such as environment and traffic monitoring and mobile health. In this work, we propose a new application scenario called context-aware friend discovery based on mobile sensing, where contextual attributes such as location, weather and temperature are utilized to enhance the existing friend discovery schemes. However, data privacy becomes a major concern for consumers to accept this application. To address this issue, we further propose a privacy-preserving context-aware friend discovery scheme, where a user's sensitive data is well protected. Security analysis shows the correctness and privacy guarantee of the proposed scheme.