Exploiting Trust-Based Social Networks for Distributed Protection of Sensitive Data

How can we protect sensitive data of average users? In this paper, we propose taking advantage of real-life social trust between average users (called “trust-based social networks”) as well as threshold cryptography. This leads to a new type of complex systems, for which we define and characterize the following novel properties: 1) attack-resilience, which captures the consequences of computers getting compromised; 2) security utility of anonymous social networks, which captures the security gained when the underlying social network links are not known to the attacker; 3) security utility of psychological soundness, which captures the security gained when a user keeps a decisive share of its sensitive data; 4) availability, which captures the effect when computers are not always responsive; 5) the trade-off between attack-resilience and availability.