SecureCSocial: Secure Cloud-Based Social Network

The following sections are included:

• Dedication
• Preface
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Acronyms

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are one of the most prominent developments the world has observed in the past decade. However, the concept is not totally novel [46]. For example, the use of emails for communication is a form of online social networking. The magnitude of usage and the spectrum of applications that are supported in today’s OSNs make them stand out from the individual social networking applications that were prevalent for quite some time, such as emails and instant messaging. An OSN is essentially a network (a computer hardware and software system) which models the real social networks (SNs) that exist naturally in the world. Hence, an OSN consists of users, connections, communications, and data shared by users. Users can be individuals or organizations…

Security and privacy in OSNs have been the subject of many studies in the past, focusing on different aspects of a much broader problem. Most of them still try to enhance user security against third-party adversaries, while some emphasize the need for more privacy when SNOs are considered as adversaries. First we will focus on different types of attacks in an OSN in Section 2.1, as discussed in [21]. Then attention is paid to efforts to preserve user privacy in existing OSNs in Section 2.2. It is becoming more common to see alternative architectures being proposed to overcome the inherent privacy weaknesses in existing OSN architectures. Section 2.3 presents a survey of such diverse architectures proposed for online social networking to enhance user privacy with Sections 2.3.1 and 2.3.2 dedicated to centralized alternative architectures and decentralized alternative architectures, respectively. Shamir’s secret sharing being the main encryption algorithm used to store user profiles in the proposed OSN, its basic concepts are reviewed in Section 2.4, followed by studies done on its application in multimedia (text, images, and video) encryption.

This chapter presents the fundamental network architecture of the proposed secure and privacy-aware OSN along with other preliminaries. Section 3.1 explains the preliminaries of the proposed work, i.e. cloud datacenter-based decentralization, securing user profiles using SSS, and the essential building blocks of the proposed OSN. Section 3.2 discusses secure communications of the proposed OSN, followed by a discussion on service infrastructure at CDCs in Section 3.3.

A more robust secure architecture was the prime objective of the proposed OSN. However, it must still have the many functionalities that users tend to expect from an OSN if it is to be accepted and used. This chapter first lists the primary operations and secondary functionalities as a framework to be considered in the proposed OSN. Section 4.1 explains how the proposed architecture can achieve the basic operations expected from an OSN. Then, in Section 4.2, we discuss how the proposed architecture along with secure mechanisms as explained in Chapter 3 can deliver a range of secondary functionalities in an OSN environment, while preserving user privacy…

As mentioned in Chapter 1, the primary objective of this study is to propose an architecture for online social networking with a trust model that only trusts a users’ friends but none else, while ensuring that it still provides the functionalities available in most conventional OSNs. Therefore, security and privacy is one of the most crucial design considerations in the proposed OSN. In this chapter, we analyze the proposed architecture for its security or vulnerability from several perspectives, starting with the justification for why SSS was chosen as the method of data encryption prior to storage, in Section 5.1. Section 5.2 analyzes the proposed OSN for its vulnerability against different potential adversaries, i.e. other nonfriend OSN users, the Advertiser(s), CDCs, the CA, and other entities external to the OSN. Different primary operations and secondary functionalities of the proposed OSN are analyzed for security as per the security services defined in the X.800 standard as applicable, in Section 5.3. Section 5.4 analyzes the resiliency of the proposed OSN architecture against the range of attacks presented in [21]. Finally, CDCs being a major system component in the proposed architecture, Section 5.5 discusses the capability of the proposed OSN to withstand known security risks in cloud computing.

Chapters 3 and 4 provided a blueprint-level description of the proposed secure and privacy-aware cloud-based architecture for online social networking. Going further we wanted to observe the feasibility of using SSS in the context of an OSN and how the user interactions in such an OSN will be. Therefore, we implemented a proof of concept (POC)-level execution of the proposed architecture in a lab environment. Section 6.1 explains the objectives of the POC implementation as well as what was not covered, along with the network setup of the POC implementation. Section 6.2 presents the results of the POC testing. The proposed OSN is analyzed for its performance in Section 6.3, and is further analyzed for its scalability in Section 6.4.

In this chapter, we summarize the presentation of this book along with its concluding remarks, which is presented in Section 7.1. We believe that this study is just the beginning and only a framework for a more secure and privacy-aware online social networking user experience. More focused research attempts may be used to optimize and develop this framework further. Section 7.2 provides an overview of such possible research directions for the proposed OSN architecture.

The following sections are included:

• References
• Index