A Step towards a Solution to Information Privacy Problem on Online Social Networks

Abstract

Online social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, have gained popularity in recent years. With that popularity, come security problems, especially problems with information privacy. This paper provides an overview of information privacy issues for online social networks. One way to solve this problem is to use cryptography. However, cryptography on online social networks has not been studied exclusively. Most works have been done on access control. The main issue with cryptography is the number of keys needed to encrypt and decrypt the information. The most obvious number of keys would be to use one key for every user in our group of friends. This is not needed or entirely true as we show here. This paper, therefore, gives an attempt to show that the number of keys needed to achieve secure sharing among friends can in fact be much smaller than the number of friends. The number of keys can actually be reduced by approximately 500% on average, using the method presented here. We also provide proofs of correctness and security to confirm our claim.