DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF AN `EFFICIENT AND SECURE' PRIVACY PRESERVING SOCIAL NETWORKING PLATFORM

Abstract

Social networking has seen exponential growth in the last one decade in terms of its membership, reach, utility and versatility. Despite the immense popularity of these Social Networking Sites (SNSs), security and privacy of users data is handled with great laxity by these sites. This may mainly be attributed to the fact that the basic ideology for the birth and growth of social networks was free interaction between its users. Hence, enhancing the privacy was often seen as a hindrance to the growth of such networks. In addition there are numerous incidents of misuse of users' data by these sites which have been widely reported in the media. Over a period of time, the users became ever so conscious of their privacy and security concerns on these networks. To meet these users' aspirations many third party security/ privacy enhancing solutions have been offered. Unfortunately all these solutions have limited applicability and in many cases reduce the reliability/ availability of the data stored on these sites. Thus, an alternative to this situation is to design a new Social Networking Platform which addressed the security and privacy issues of the user from the design stage itself. In this dissertation, titled "Design and Development of an `Efficient and Secure' privacy preserving Social Networking Platform", a novel social networking architecture is proposed and implemented. A new hybrid architecture has been adopted for Social Networking, a first time for social networks. By uniquely interleaving the concepts of `Data Relocation', `Fake Information' and `Encryption' it provides a secure and efficient platform for users to interact. A novel Visual Cryptographic (VC) algorithm `Sieving Division Shuffle' (SDS) algorithm has been proposed for use in a real world Secure Medical Network. The proposed algorithm facilitates keyless encryption which reduces the overheads of key management. In addition to being efficient it is also able to regenerate the original image without loss of picture quality. The use of such a Visual Cryptographic scheme on Social Networks has for the first time been proposed and implemented). The proposed architecture thus addresses the key issues of privacy and security of users data on Social Networks and provides users a platform where they have total control on autonomy and security of their, sensitive data.