Persona: an online social network with user-defined privacy

TitlePersona: an online social network with user-defined privacy
Publication TypeConference Papers
Year of Publication2009
AuthorsBaden R, Bender A, Spring N, Bhattacharjee B, Starin D
Conference NameProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2009 conference on Data communication
Date Published2009///
PublisherACM
Conference LocationNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number978-1-60558-594-9
KeywordsABE, Facebook, OSN, persona, privacy, social networks
Abstract

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.

URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1592568.1592585
DOI10.1145/1592568.1592585