Cryptographic treatment of private user profiles

Abstract

The publication of private data in user profiles in a both secure and private way is a rising problem and of special interest in, e.g., online social networks that become more and more popular. Current approaches, especially for decentralized networks, often do not address this issue or impose large storage overhead. In this paper, we present a cryptographic approach to Private Profile Management that is seen as a building block for applications in which users maintain their own profiles, publish and retrieve data, and authorize other users to access different portions of data in their profiles. In this course, we provide: (i) formalization of confidentiality and unlinkability as two main security and privacy goals for the data which is kept in profiles and users who are authorized to retrieve this data, and (ii) specification, analysis, and comparison of two private profile management schemes based on different encryption techniques. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.