TY - JOUR T1 - Persona : An Online Social Network with User-Defined Privacy Categories and Subject Descriptors JF - Computer Y1 - 2009 A1 - Starin,Daniel A1 - Baden,Randy A1 - Bender,Adam A1 - Spring, Neil A1 - Bhattacharjee, Bobby AB - Online social networks (OSNs) are immensely popular, with some claiming over 200 million users. Users share private content, such as personal information or photographs, using OSN applications. Users must trust the OSN service to protect personal information even as the OSN provider benefits from examining and sharing that information. We present Persona, an OSN where users dictate who may access their information. Persona hides user data with attribute-based encryption (ABE), allowing users to apply fine-grained policies over who may view their data. Persona provides an effective means of creating applications in which users, not the OSN, define policy over access to private data. We demonstrate new cryptographic mechanisms that enhance the general applicability of ABE. We show how Persona provides the functionality of existing online social networks with additional privacy benefits. We describe an implementation of Persona that replicates Facebook applications and show that Persona provides acceptable performance when browsing privacy-enhanced web pages, even on mobile devices. VL - 39 CP - 4 M3 - 10.1145/1594977.1592585 ER -