Leveraging Social Links for Trust and Privacy in Networks

Existing on-line social networks (OSN) such as Facebook suffer from several weaknesses regarding privacy and security due to their inherent handling of personal data. As pointed out in [4], a preliminary analysis of existing OSNs shows that they are subject to a number of vulnerabilities, ranging from cloning legitimate users to sybil attacks through privacy violations. Starting from these OSN vulnerabilities as the first step of a broader research activity, we came up with a new approach that is very promising in re-visiting security and privacy problems in distributed systems and networks. We suggest a solution that both aims at avoiding any centralized control and leverages on the real life trust between users, that is part of the social network application itself. An anonymization technique based on multi-hop routing among trusted nodes guarantees privacy in data access and, generally speaking, in all the OSN operations.