Social networking: security, privacy, and applications
Sonia Jahid · 2013
Online social networks have become ubiquitous and changed the way that users interact online. There has been an enormous growth in the usage of online social networking in the past few years as users share a variety of information including personal profiles, pictures, and messages to socialize with their friends in the Internet. Besides, several special purpose social networks have emerged to serve their users with useful functionalities. This vast amount of user data is valuable, and therefore, introduce several security and privacy risks and challenges. In this thesis we propose several techniques to enhance the security and privacy features of online social networks. Our goal is to shift the control over user data from a centralized social network provider to the end users. We realize this concept by decentralization of the social networking architecture. First, we construct and implement a cryptographic access control mecha-nism that ensures data confidentiality and integrity, and efficiently supports