On Securely Scheduling a Meeting

Abstract

Keywords:When people want to schedule a meeting, their agendas must be compared to find a time suitable for all participants. At the same time, people want to keep their agendas private. This paper presents several approaches which intend to solve this contradiction. A custom-made protocol for secure meeting scheduling and a protocol based on secure distributed computing are discussed. The security properties and complexity of these protocols are compared. A trade-off between trust and bandwidth requirements is shown to be possible by implementing the protocols using mobile agents. mobile agents, secure distributed computation, meeting scheduling

Privacy-preserving activity scheduling on mobile devices

“…In the literature, the four most relevant bodies of work that address privacy in scheduling or similar scenarios are based on techniques from private set-intersection [20,11], distributed constraint satisfaction [27,28,24,25], secure multi-party computation [18,12] and e-voting [19]. Hereafter, we review the most relevant aspects of such approaches.…”

“…Solutions based on secure multi-party computation were investigated in [12] and a practical scheme was proposed in [18]. Herlea et al [18], for instance, design and evaluate a distributed secure scheduling protocol by relying on properties of the XOR operation over binary values, in which all users contribute to the secrecy of individual schedules while ensuring the correctness of the results.…”

“…Privacy-preserving scheduling problems have been extensively studied in the past by researchers from the theoretical perspective, for instance, by modeling them as set intersection problems [20,11], distributed constraint satisfaction problems [27,28,24,25], secure multi-party computation problems [18,12] and by framing them in the e-voting context [19]. Traditionally, there are two possible approaches to the scheduling problems: distributed and centralized.…”

Privacy-Enhanced Event Scheduling

“…We are aware about only one specific publication on secure and verifiable event scheduling [35], which in fact covers three different approaches to the problem. One is a solution based on a trusted third party, which is efficient, but stands in contrast to our requirement of limited trust in a central entity.…”

Meeting Scheduling Guaranteeing n/2-Privacy and Resistant to Statistical Analysis (Applicable to any DisCSP)

“…An arithmetic circuit whose outcome is the set of all solutions was designed in [3]. If one tries to use that approach when only one solution is needed, the result returned by the function will reveal to everybody a lot more information than needed.…”