Snake: An End-to-End Encrypted Online Social Network
Alessandro Barenghi, Michele Beretta, Alessandro Di Federico, Gerardo Pelosi · 2014
Online Social Networks (OSNs) have evolved into one of the prime means for social interactions, effectively generating significant amount of digital contents. In this context, providing proper privacy and confidentiality services for the generated contents is a crucial issue to foster their development. We propose Snake, an end-to-end encrypted social network, where the confidentiality and privacy-protecting logic is shouldered entirely by the clients, improving the guarantees provided by state of the art solutions. We designed Snake so that the storage provider performs only simple data access operations, and the inspection of the data at rest does not reveal the involved parties in a communication. We implemented Snake as a single page HTML5 Java Script application employing W3C's Web Crypto API, and evaluated experimentally our approach proving its practical feasibility.