Logical Key Hierarchy for Group Management in Distributed Online Social Networks
Distributed Online Social Networks (DOSNs) have recently been proposed to shift the control over user data from a unique entity to the users of the DOSN themselves. In this paper, we focus our attention on the problem of privacy preserving content sharing to a large group of users of the DOSNs. Several solutions, based on cryptographic techniques, have been recently proposed. The main challenge here is the definition of a scalable and decentralized approach that: i) minimizes the re-encryption of the contents published in a group when the composition of the group changes and ii) enables a fast distribution of the cryptographic keys to all the members (n) of a group, each time a new user is …
Distributed Coverage of Ego Networks in F2F Online Social Networks
Although most online social networks rely on a centralized infrastructure, several proposals of Distributed Online Social Networks (DOSNs) have been recently presented. Since in DOSNs user profiles are stored on the peers of the users belonging to the network, one of the main challenges comes from guaranteeing the profile availability when the owner of the data is not online. In this paper, we propose a DOSN based on a friend-to-friend P2P overlay where the user's data is stored only on friend peers. Our approach is based on the ego-network concept, which models the social network from the local point of view of a single user. We propose a distributed algorithm which is based on the notion …
A Logical Key Hierarchy Based approach to preserve content privacy in Decentralized Online Social Networks
Distributed Online Social Networks (DOSNs) have been proposed to shift the control over user data from a unique entity, the online social network provider, to the users of the DOSN themselves. In this paper we focus on the problem of preserving the privacy of the contents shared to large groups of users. In general, content privacy is enforced by encrypting the content, having only authorized parties being able to decrypt it. When efficiency has to be taken into account, new solutions have to be devised that: i) minimize the re-encryption of the contents published in a group when the composition of the group changes; and, ii) enable a fast distribution of the cryptographic keys to all the m…
A Smart Contract Based Recommender System
Nowadays information available on the World Wide Web has reached unprecedented growth and it makes difficult for users to find the most relevant for them. In order to alleviate such issue, Recommender Systems (RSs) have been proposed to collect opinions and preferences about a set of items, process such preferences and build a personalized information access. While the most part of current RSs exploit centralized architecture to provide the service, in this manuscript we propose an alternative approach for building a general purpose RSs that provides to users with more transparent and decentralized rating strategy. Indeed, the proposed framework is built on top of a Distributed Ledger techn…
Discovering Homophily in Online Social Networks
During the last ten years, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have increased their popularity by becoming part of the real life of users. Despite their tremendous widespread, OSNs have introduced several privacy issues as a consequence of the nature of the information involved in these services. Indeed, the huge amount of private information produced by users of current OSNs expose the users to a number of risks. The analysis of the users’ similarity in OSNs is attracting the attention of researchers because of its implications on privacy and social marketing. In particular, the homophily between users could be used to reveal important characteristics that users would like to keep hidden, hence …
Evaluating the impact of friends in predicting user’s availability in online social networks
In recent years, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have changed the way people connect and interact with each other. Indeed, most people have registered an account on some popular OSNs (such as Facebook, or Google+) which is used to access the system at different times of the days, depending on their life and habits. In this context, understanding how users connect to the OSNs is of paramount importance for both the protection of their privacy and the OSN’s provider (or third-party applications) that want to exploit this information. In this paper, we study the task of predicting the availability status (online/offline) of the OSNs’ users by exploiting the availability information of their frie…
Privacy and temporal aware allocation of data in decentralized online social networks
Distributed Online Social Networks (DOSNs) have recently been proposed to grant users more control over the data they share with the other users. Indeed, in contrast to centralized Online Social Networks (such as Facebook), DOSNs are not based on centralized storage services, because the contents shared by the users are stored on the devices of the users themselves. One of the main challenges in a DOSN comes from guaranteeing availability of the users' contents when the data owner disconnects from the network. In this paper, we focus our attention on data availability by proposing a distributed allocation strategy which takes into account both the privacy policies defined on the contents an…
A privacy-aware framework for decentralized online social networks
Online social networks based on a single service provider suffer several drawbacks, first of all the privacy issues arising from the delegation of user data to a single entity. Distributed online social networks (DOSN) have been recently proposed as an alternative solution allowing users to keep control of their private data. However, the lack of a centralized entity introduces new problems, like the need of defining proper privacy policies for data access and of guaranteeing the availability of user's data when the user disconnects from the social network. This paper introduces a privacy-aware support for DOSN enabling users to define a set of privacy policies which describe who is entitle…
A Survey on Privacy in Decentralized Online Social Networks
Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) have recently captured the interest of users because of the more control given to them over their shared contents. Indeed, most of the user privacy issues related to the centralized Online Social Network (OSN) services (such as Facebook or Google+) do not apply in the case of DOSNs because of the absence of the centralized service provider. However, these new architectures have motivated researchers to investigate new privacy solutions that allow DOSN’s users to protect their contents by taking into account the decentralized nature of the DOSNs platform. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the privacy solutions adopted by…
An Analysis of the Internal Organization of Facebook Groups
With the rapid development and growth of online social networks (OSNs), researchers have been pushed forward to improve the knowledge of these complex networks by analyzing several aspects, such as the types of social media, the structural properties of the network, or the interaction patterns among users. In particular, a relevant effort has been devoted to the study and identification of cohesive groups of users in OSNs (also referred as communities) because they are the basic building block of each OSN. While several research works on groups in OSNs have mainly focused on identifying the types of groups and the contents created by their members, the analysis of internal organizations of …
Privacy-preserving data allocation in decentralized online social networks
International audience; Distributed Online Social Networks (DOSNs) have been recently proposed as an alternative to centralized solutions to allow a major control of the users over their own data. Since there is no centralized service provider which decides the term of service, the DOSNs infrastructure exploits users’ devices to take on the online social network services. In this paper, we propose a data allocation strategy for DOSNs which exploits the privacy policies of the users to increase the availability of the users’ contents without diverging from their privacy preferences. A set of replicas of the profile’s content of a user U are stored on the devices of other users who are entitl…