Publishing and sharing encrypted data with potential friends in online social networks

Abstract

Making friends by publishing and sharing personal data in a special interest group has become popular in online social networks. Data security is a major concern, as digital content can be easily accessed from all over the Internet, and the online social network service provider is often for profit and semi‐trusted. The standard solution to data security is encryption, but sharing of encrypted data then becomes a challenging task. In this paper, employing attribute‐based encryption (ABE), we propose Masque+, a novel hierarchical and fine‐grained access control mechanism. On the basis of key policy ABE, the service provider manages users on the system level, but without being able to access their sensitive data. On the basis of ciphertext policy ABE, members of an interest group may customize their own access policies specifically. Masque+ features pragmatic functionalities like user revocation on the system level and the group level, respectively. We also build a prototype to validate the cryptographic algorithms involved in Masque+ and evaluate their performances. Real experimental data show that Masque+ incurs fairly reasonable costs even in cases where the access control policy is significantly complex. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Multiparty Access Control of Ciphertext Sharing in Cloud-Based Online Social Networks

“…The proxy agent re-encrypts the ciphertext by the latest proxy key, and refreshes all the private keys held by the legal users. Shuai et al improved the Masque and achieved immediate user revocation by updating corresponding secret parameters related to the revoked attributes [17]. However, these immediate user revocation schemes will cause the key update operation of large numbers of users in OSNs.…”

“…The comparison results are shown in Table 1. Compared with access control schemes based on ABE [11,12,13,17], our scheme encrypts the data with DK using symmetric encryption algorithm, and encrypts the DK based on CP-ABE, which is more efficient. Besides, our scheme supports the multiparty access control based on CP-ABPRE, and allows multiple controllers include the owner and the disseminator to customize access policies.…”

Special issue on applied cryptography for information and communication networks

“…In the second paper, “Publishing and Sharing Encrypted Data with Potential Friends in Online Social Networks” , Shuai and Zhu propose a full‐fledged access control scheme called Masque+ for online social networks employing attribute‐based encryption. With Masque+, one can publish and share his encrypted data with potential new friends who have the same interests just as in a masquerade with various themes.…”