Introduction
People in the same group (e.g., students in the same class or employees in the same office), may develop a romantic interest in one another. However, this may cause embarrassment, perhaps even leading to an end of a friendship or difficulty in collaborating. For this reason, people are often shy about speaking out their interest in another person. However, at the same time, not being able to confess an interest would also be unfortunate when two people are coincidentally mutually interested. To avoid this, we aim to solve the problem at its source, which is to prevent the potential for embarrassment while still registering the interest, maintaining the security and privacy of the source party.
In addition, we want to keep all the "relationships" private even to the service provider.
Note
I came up with this project idea in my senior year at UM-SJTU JI and took it as my capstone design project. The scheme we came up was preliminary. I tried to continue this project after joining UCSD and talked to Mihir, Deian and Daniele. Based on the conversations, I presented an improved version at the 2019 CSE Research Open House poster session to collect more feedbacks. Currently, this project is suspended for lack of cycles. But I'm still interested in this problem and will devote more time to it if there's a chance.
Future Work
Some thoughts about future directions:
- Give a formal cryptography definition (probably game-based) on "security" and "privacy" in this context.
- Give a scalable protocol which satisfies the above definition.
- Connect to contact-tracing problem and homomorphic encryption.