Online Social Network with flexible and dynamic privacy policies

Online Social Networks (OSN) have become widely popular in recent years. OSN enable people to connect with their friends based on sharing information about their personal life. There are some serious privacy problems that need to be resolved in existing OSN: Firstly, there has to be a method to protect user-generated data from OSN providers. Secondly, a fully flexible and dynamic access control mechanism should exist to protect private data against attackers and unauthorized friends. Thirdly, the aforementioned access control system should be efficient in managing the privacy policies of OSN users. To meet these requirements, this paper presents a privacy protection solution for OSN with a customizable privacy control. In the proposed approach, the users keep control of their data without any help from the OSN provider or a trusted third party. The introduced scheme employs identity based broadcast encryption (IBBE) system to communicate the private data to intended OSN users. The privacy and efficiency analysis show the proposed architecture is a great improvement over existing approaches in preserving the privacy of OSN users.