Privacy-preserving distance measurement and its applications

Distance measurement is widely used in many computations. The known methods usually require one to know the whole data of the engaged objects, they aren't fit for the situation where the concerned data objects belong to different users and no user is willing to disclose his information to other users. In this paper, the privacy-preserving distance measurement is studied. The multiplication problem is first proposed and the multiplication protocol is developed based on the Pallier's homomorphic encryption schemes. A general distance measure protocol and an efficient two dimensional distance protocol are presented respectively. In the proposed solutions, secure multi-party computation techniques are adopted instead of a third party as used in the known methods. Our method proves to be secure and efficient and their applications are also discussed.