Reflection: a lightweight protocol for private matching

Applications of private matching (PM) are not limited to any specific domain of interest. Social media, e-health and commerce applications can afford to share certain common information without disclosing any extra details. PM ensures to reveal only common information between the communicating parties. In this paper we have presented a light weight protocol named Reflection for PM. Depending upon different requirements of involving parties, Reflection can be used in presence of third party or as a point to point communication. Using services of third party (cloud) where communication has to route through it, it still preserves the privacy aspect of values being matched. The protocol works on a random number and produces the result of matching on behalf of original values, hence it converges in only two pass communication. It also protects any additional slipway of information during or after the PM. It safeguards the user communication against eavesdropper and even from offline attacks. In its simpler version, the protocol can work without using any encryption. Value comparison mechanism in presence of encryption, makes the overall process of PM more secure against hostile users.