SocialCloudShare: a Facebook Application for a Relationship-based Information Sharing in the Cloud

• Main Authors: Davide Albertini, Barbara Carminati, Elena Ferrari
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: European Alliance for Innovation (EAI) 2014-10-01
• Series: EAI Endorsed Transactions on Collaborative Computing
• Subjects: Online Social Networks; Collaborative graph anonymization; Controlled information sharing; Privacypreserving path finding
• Online Access: http://eudl.eu/doi/10.4108/cc.1.2.e6

In last few years, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become one of the most used platforms for sharing data (e.g., pictures, short texts) on the Internet. Nowadays Facebook and Twitter are the most popular OSN providers, though they implement different social models. However, independently from the social model they implement, OSN platforms have become a widespread repository of personal information. All these data (e.g., profile information, shared elements, users’ likes) are stored in a centralized repository that can be exploited for data mining and marketing analysis. With this data collection process, lots of sensitive information are gathered by OSN providers that, in time, have become more and more targeted by malicious attackers. To overcome this problem, in this paper we present an architectural framework that, by means of a Social Application registered in Facebook, allows users to move their data (e.g., relationships, resources) outside the OSN realm and to store them in the public Cloud. Given that the public Cloud is not a secure and private environment, our proposal provides users security and privacy guarantees over their data by encrypting the resources and by anonymizing their social graphs. The presented framework enforces Relationship-Based Access Control (ReBAC) rules over the anonymized social graph, providing OSN users the possibility to selectively share information and resources as they are used to do in Facebook.