Scramble! Your social network data

Abstract

Social network sites (SNS) allow users to share information with friends, family, and other contacts. However, current SNS sites such as Facebook or Twitter assume that users trust SNS providers with the access control of their data. In this paper we propose Scramble, the implementation of a SNS-independent Firefox extension that allows users to enforce access control over their data. Scramble lets users define access control lists (ACL) of authorised users for each piece of data, based on their preferences. The definition of ACL is facilitated through the possibility of dynamically defining contact groups. In turn, the confidentiality and integrity of one data item is enforced using cryptographic techniques. When accessing a SNS that contains data encrypted using Scramble, the plugin transparently decrypts and checks integrity of the encrypted content. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.