DP5: A Private Presence Service

Users of social applications like to be notified when their friends are online. Typically, this is done by a central server keeping track of who is online and offline, as well as of all of the users’ “buddy lists”, which contain sensitive information. We present DP5, a cryptographic service that implements online presence indication in a privacy-friendly way. DP5 allows clients to register their online presence and query the presence of their list of friends while keeping this list secret. Besides presence, high-integrity status updates are supported, to facilitate key update and rendezvous protocols. While infrastructure services are required for DP5 to operate, they are designed to not require any long-term secrets and provide perfect forward secrecy in case of compromise. We provide security arguments for the indistinguishability properties of the protocol, as well as an evaluation of its scalability and performance. DOI 10.1515/popets-2015-0008 Received 2014-11-15; revised 2015-05-15; accepted 2015-05-15.