A collaborative framework for privacy protection in online social networks

With the wide use of online social networks (OSNs), the problem of data privacy has attracted much attention. Several approaches have been proposed to address this issue. One of privacy management approaches for OSN leverages a key management technique to enable a user to simply post encrypted contents so that only users who can satisfy the associate security policy can derive the key to access the data. However, the key management policies of existing schemes may grant access to unauthorized users and cannot efficiently determine authorized users. In this paper, we propose a collaborative framework which enforces access control for OSN through an innovative key management focused on communities. This framework introduces a community key management based on a new group-oriented convergence cryptosystem, as well as provides an efficient privacy preservation needed in a private OSN. To prove the feasibility of our approach, we also discuss a proof-of-concept implementation of our framework. Experimental results show that our construction can achieve the identified design goals for OSNs with the acceptable performance.