PeerShare: A System Secure Distribution of Sensitive Data among Social Contacts

Proceedings of the 9th ACM MobiCom Workshop on Challenged Networks

Kärkkäinen

Ott

2014

Self Cite

Mobile opportunistic networking utilizes device-to-device communication to provide messaging and content sharing mechanisms between mobile users without the need for supporting infrastructure networks. However, enabling opportunistic networking in practice requires a sufficient number of users to download, install, and run the respective routing and application software to provide sufficient node density, and thus connectivity for the network to actually function. In this paper, we explore reaching out to nodes that have not (yet) installed any dedicated software to: (1) allow them to access public content in an opportunistic network to possibly seed their interest and (2) instrument them to assist as (limited) message carriers to improve connectivity. We report on our system design and implementation and offer performance insights gained from simulations and initial experiments.

Section: Security Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhancing opportunistic networks with legacy nodes

Proceedings of the 9th ACM MobiCom Workshop on Challenged Networks

Kärkkäinen

Ott

2014

Self Cite

“…On the server side, the Social PaL system extends the PeerShare server [28], which allows two or more users to share sensitive data among social contacts, e.g., friends in a social network. We use the following basic functions of PeerShare: (1) OSN interfaces to retrieve social graph information, (2) the OAuth [14] component for user authentication, and (3) the data distribution mechanism.…”

Section: Server Architecturementioning

confidence: 99%

How far removed are you?

Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Security &Amp; Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks

Bui

Cristofaro

et al. 2015

Self Cite

Social relationships are a natural basis on which humans make trust decisions. Online Social Networks (OSNs) are increasingly often used to let users base trust decisions on the existence and the strength of social relationships. While most OSNs allow users to discover the length of the social path to other users, they do so in a centralized way, thus requiring them to rely on the service provider and reveal their interest in each other.This paper presents Social PaL, a system supporting the privacypreserving discovery of arbitrary-length social paths between any two social network users. We overcome the bootstrapping problem encountered in all related prior work, demonstrating that Social PaL allows its users to find all paths of length two and to discover a significant fraction of longer paths, even when only a small fraction of OSN users is in the Social PaL system -e.g., discovering 70% of all paths with only 40% of the users. We implement Social PaL using a scalable server-side architecture and a modular Android client library, allowing developers to seamlessly integrate it into their apps.

“…They are distributed over a confidential and authentic channel, thus ensuring that U cannot claim non-existent friendships. The capability distribution system is implemented on top of PeerShare, a generic scheme for securely distributing data among social groups, which we developed earlier [43].…”

Section: System Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do I know you?

Proceedings of the 29th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference

Cristofaro

Dmitrienko

et al. 2013

Self Cite

The increasing penetration of Online Social Networks (OSNs) prompts the need for effectively accessing and utilizing social networking information. In numerous applications, users need to make trust and/or access control decisions involving other (possibly stranger) users, and one important factor is often the existence of common social relationships. This motivates the need for secure and privacy-preserving techniques allowing users to assess whether or not they have mutual friends.This paper introduces the Common Friends service, a framework for finding common friends which protects privacy of nonmutual friends and guarantees authenticity of friendships. First, we present a generic construction that reduces to secure computation of set intersection, while ensuring authenticity of announced friends via bearer capabilities. Then, we propose an efficient instantiation, based on Bloom filters, that only incurs a constant number of public-key operations and appreciably low communication overhead. Our software is designed so that developers can easily integrate Common Friends into their applications, e.g., to enforce access control based on users' social proximity in a privacypreserving manner. Finally, we showcase our techniques in the context of an existing application for sharing (tethered) Internet access, whereby users decide to share access depending on the existence of common friends. A comprehensive experimental evaluation attests to the practicality of proposed techniques.