A privacy-preserving encrypted OSN with stateless server interaction: The Snake design

Providing the means for a private and secure interaction among people is a growing concern in the modern interconnected society. In this work we present Snake, a fully end-to-end encrypted Online Social Network (OSN) aimed at providing privacy even when faced with a leakage (or forced disclosure) of encrypted data happening to the storage provider. In Snake, we shift the vast majority of the OSN working logic onto the client, preserving usability and scalability in group communications, requiring a simple stateless interface with the storage provider, while retaining acceptable timings on desktop and mobile platforms alike. We validate our proposal implementing Snake as a single-page HTML5 application, and performing performance tests with realistic network latencies and bandwidth figures to demonstrate that our proposal achieves sufficient performance levels to provide a usable, end-to-end encrypted OSN. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.