Enforcing Trust Preferences in Mobile Person-to-Person Payments

The technological advancements in Internet speeds, increased computing power and smart phones have pushed the rise of new digital methods supporting mobile person-to-person (P2P) payments. Despite the growing interest in these new methods, we believe that, to fully enable this increasing rise of digital wallets, there is the need for tools helping a person in judging the risk of a money transfer. For this purpose, this paper aims at exploiting social network connections. This is achieved by making payers/payees able to state their trust preferences with respect to the potential payees/payers. Trust preference evaluation requires to find social connections between a payer and a payee across, possible, different social network realms. We therefore propose a light cryptography protocol, specifically targeted to mobile P2P payments, that besides providing good performance, ensures user information privacy.