Towards a privacy-preserving solution for OSNs

Abstract

In this short paper, we describe a solution to protect users' privacy in online social networks (OSNs). The solution achieves the following functionalities: (1) it enables users to store their private data securely; (2) it enables users, from the same or different OSNs, to compute their similarity through a secure protocol; (3) it enables similar users to establish a session key for secure communication. Different from existing solutions in the literature, which often rely on a global public key infrastructure or/and traditional key distribution techniques, the proposed solution leverages on the trust between friends and the entropy of users' private attributes. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.