Implementing a privacy-enhanced attribute-based credential system for online social networks with co-ownership management

Online social network (OSN) users are exhibiting an increased privacy-protective behaviour especially since multimedia sharing has emerged as a popular activity over most OSN sites. Popular OSN applications could reveal much of the users' personal information or let it easily derived, hence favouring different types of misbehaviour. In this article the authors deal with these privacy concerns by applying fine-grained access control and co-ownership management over the shared data. This proposal defines access policy as any linear boolean formula that is collectively determined by all users being exposed in that data collection namely the co-owners. All co-owners are empowered to take part in the process of data sharing by expressing (secretly) their privacy preferences and, as a result, jointly agreeing on the access policy. Access policies are built upon the concept of secret sharing systems. A number of predicates such as gender, affiliation or postal code can define a particular privacy setting. User attributes are then used as predicate values. In addition, by the deployment of privacy-enhanced attribute-based credential technologies, users satisfying the access policy will gain access without disclosing their real identities. The authors have implemented this system as a Facebook application demonstrating its viability, and procuring reasonable performance costs.