Title: Hidden Elo: Private Matchmaking through Encrypted Rating Systems
Authors: Mindaugas Budzys, Bin Liu and Antonis Michalas
Venue: 16th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY), Frankfurt, Germany, June 23—25, 2026..
Abstract: Matchmaking has become a prevalent part in contemporary applications, being used in dating apps, social media, online games, contact tracing and in various other use-cases. However, most implementations of matchmaking require the collection of sensitive/personal data for proper functionality. As such, with this work we aim to reduce the privacy leakage inherent in matchmaking applications. We propose H-Elo, a Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)-based, private rating system, which allows for secure matchmaking through the use of traditional rating systems. In this work, we provide the construction of H-Elo, analyse the security of it against a capable adversary as well as benchmark our construction in a chess-based rating update scenario. Through our experiments we show that H-Elo can achieve similar accuracy to a plaintext implementation, while keeping rating values private and secure. Additionally, we compare our work to other private matchmaking solutions as well as cover some future directions in the field of private matchmaking. To the best of our knowledge we provide one of the first private and secure rating system-based matchmaking protocols.
