A Secure and Privacy-Aware Cloud-Based Architecture for Online Social Networks

Abstract

Abstract. The use of social networks has grown exponentially in recent years, and these social networks continue to have an ever-increasing impact on human lives. There are many concerns regarding the privacy of users in these environments, such as how trustworthy the social network operators are, in addition to the external adversaries. In this paper we propose a new architecture for online social networking, based on distributed cloud-based datacenters and using secret sharing as the method of encrypting user profile data, for enhanced privacy and availability. This proposed architecture is theoretically analyzed for its security and performance along with some experimental analysis. We show that the proposed architecture is highly secure at an acceptable level of time complexity overhead in comparison to existing online social networks, as well as the models proposed in previous studies targeting the same research problem.