DELF: Safeguarding deletion correctness in Online Social Networks
Katriel Cohn-Gordon, Georgios Damaskinos, Divino Neto, Joshi Cordova, Benoît Reitz, Benjamin Strahs, Daniel Obenshain, Paul Pearce, Ioannis Papagiannis · Infoscience (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) · 2020
Deletion is a core facet of Online Social Networks (OSNs). For users, deletion is a tool to remove what they have shared and control their data. For OSNs, robust deletion is both an obligation to their users and a risk when developer mistakes inevitably occur. While developers are effective at identifying high-level deletion requirements in products (e.g., users should be able to delete posted photos), they are less effective at mapping high-level requirements into concrete operations (e.g., deleting all relevant items in data stores). Without framework support, developer mistakes lead to violations of users' privacy, such as retaining data that should be deleted, deleting the wrong data, and exploitable vulnerabilities.