A Privacy-Preserving Scheme for Online Social Networks with Efficient Revocation

Online social networks (OSNs) are attractive applications which enable a group of users to share data and stay connected. Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter are among the most popular applications of OSNs where personal information is shared among group contacts. Due to the private nature of the shared information, data privacy is an indispensable security requirement in OSN applications. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving scheme for data sharing in OSNs, with efficient revocation for deterring a contact's access right to the private data once the contact is removed from the social group. In addition, the proposed scheme offers advanced features such as efficient search over encrypted data files and dynamic changes to group membership. With slight modification, we extend the application of the proposed scheme to anonymous online social networks of different security and functional requirements. The proposed scheme is demonstrated to be secure, effective, and efficient.