MP3: A More Efficient Private Presence Protocol

Abstract: This paper proposes MP3, the second privacy-preserving presence protocol that leaks no information about the graph structure of the social network. Several cryptographic techniques are applied to improve the existing DP5 protocol---the first privacy-preserving presence protocol---while maintaining the same level of privacy. The key contribution of this paper is the use of a dynamic broadcast encryption scheme to reduce the size of the presence database. This enables cheaper registration and lookup required for the protocol. As compared to DP5, MP3 requires on the order of ten times less bandwidth of the servers during registration, and requires on the order of two times less bandwidth for lookup, for a small number of users ($N=10000$). Furthermore, these savings asymptotically increase with the number of users. The client-side latency is also improved significantly in MP3, as compared with DP5. We provide an evaluation of the performance and scalability of both protocols.