Privacy preserving in online social networks (Facebook system)

Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSN) facilitate connections between people based on shared interests, values, and membership in groups. They make it easier for people to connect and communicate with others in their networks using the Web as the interface.

Today, the most popular and largest social networking site is Facebook with over a billion active users worldwide. With well-designed functions, user friendly interface and optimized connections, Facebook has dramatically changed the way many people communicate online. It allows activities such as new status, comments, photos, videos and links to be streamed to other users in real time. Through these activities, online social networks contain enormous volume of users' information relating to their personal lives, preferences, hobbies, and even online behaviors. These fragments of information, when combined, can provide a very high value profile of a user. Furthermore, OSN providers often have full access to all of the personal information which users share. This information may even include materials which have been deleted and this violates users' rights to determine the existence of their owned data. More critically, OSN providers may disclose users' information or trade it for greater profit.

Therefore, the project (e-Facebook) aims to build a privacy preserving social network using secured cryptographic framework. This guarantees the confidentiality and integrity of users' data towards the OSN providers, malicious users and intruders. e-Facebook provides functions such as posting comments, updating statuses, likes, chats, adding friends, uploading images. The cryptography ensures that these functions are integrated with secured encryption and decryption schemes to guarantee the confidentiality of users' data and prevent privacy leakage. The framework will sign and encrypt user’s posted content at the client machine before transferring to the server. In addition, the e-Facebook’s overall Graphical User Interface (GUI) is further enhanced to deliver the desired functionality. It enables its users to have efficient, user friendly and rewarding experience on the online social network.