A Collaborative Framework for Privacy Protection in Online Social Networks

With the wide use of online social networks (OSNs), the problem of data privacy has attracted much attention. Several approaches have been proposed to address this issue. One of privacy management approaches for OSN leverages a key management technique to enable a user to simply post encrypted contents so that only users who can satisfy the associate security policy can derive the key to access the data. However, the key management policies of existing schemes may grant access to unaurhorized users and cannot efficiently determine authorized users. In this paper, we propose a collaborative framework which enforces access control for OSN through an innovative key management focused on communities. This framework introduces a community key management based on a new group-oriented convergence cryptosystem, as well as provides an efficient privacy preservation needed in a private OSN. To prove the feasibility of our approach, we also discuss a proof-of-concept implementation of our framework. Experimental results show that our construction can achieve the identified design goals for OSNs with the acceptable performance

A privacy-preserving model to control social interaction behaviors in social network sites

Social Network Sites (SNSs) served as an invaluable platform to transfer information across a large number of users. SNSs also disseminate users data to third-parties to provide more interesting services for users as well as gaining profits. Users grant access to third-parties to use their services, although they do not necessarily protect users’ data privacy. Controlling social network data diffusion among users and third-parties is difficult due to the vast amount of data. Hence, undesirable users’ data diffusion to unauthorized parties in SNSs may endanger users’ privacy. This paper highlights the privacy breaches on SNSs and emphasizes the most significant privacy issues to users. The goals of this paper are to i) propose a privacy-preserving model for social interactions among users and third-parties; ii) enhance users’ privacy by providing access to the data for appropriate third-parties. These advocate to not compromising the advantages of SNSs information sharing functionalities

An investigation of high school learners using MXIT, and their attitudes towards mobile security.

Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, 2011.This research encompassed an investigation of high school learners using MXiT, and their attitudes towards mobile security guidelines. The research was conducted across thirteen schools in the Pinetown, ILembe and Umlazi districts of KwaZulu-Natal. The literature review has shown that the majority of security guidelines and their successful use depend on education and awareness of what these security measures are. Secure use of mobile social networking sites such as MXiT are best regulated by parental awareness and monitoring of children‟s online habits. This needs parents to be abreast of technology, its uses and benefits, the associated dangers, as well as how to encourage and monitor usage. The research was conducted by administering questionnaires to grades 8 to 11 inclusive in the three districts of KwaZulu-Natal. Out of the 1300 questionnaires handed out to learners, a total of 856 completed questionnaires (66%) were received and analysed. It was found from the study that 89,5% of under age users that participated in this research are using MXiT. Users are also not fully aware of the security features when using MXiT. It has also been found that African respondents as compared with non- African respondents are less aware of the possible dangers in using MXiT, less aware that criminals can use fake IDs and pretend to be someone they are not, and less aware that people can get addicted to MXiT. Learners are aware of the dangers that can be associated with MXiT; however they are prepared to talk to strangers and meet new people online, thus exposing themselves to these dangers. In conclusion, there is scope to improve the security measures for MXiT users, and there is a need to improve the levels of education around using these security features

A DISTRIBUTED APPROACH TO PRIVACY ON THE CLOUD

The increasing adoption of Cloud-based data processing and storage poses a number of privacy issues. Users wish to preserve full control over their sensitive data and cannot accept it to be fully accessible to an external storage provider. Previous research in this area was mostly addressed at techniques to protect data stored on untrusted database servers; however, I argue that the Cloud architecture presents a number of specific problems and issues. This dissertation contains a detailed analysis of open issues. To handle them, I present a novel approach where confidential data is stored in a highly distributed partitioned database, partly located on the Cloud and partly on the clients. In my approach, data can be either private or shared; the latter is shared in a secure manner by means of simple grant-and-revoke permissions. I have developed a proof-of-concept implementation using an in\u2011memory RDBMS with row-level data encryption in order to achieve fine-grained data access control. This type of approach is rarely adopted in conventional outsourced RDBMSs because it requires several complex steps. Benchmarks of my proof-of-concept implementation show that my approach overcomes most of the problems

多元情報のプロファイリングに基づくソーシャルメディアからの個人の再特定

電気通信大学202