A Privacy-preserving Community-based P2P OSNs Using Broadcast Encryption Supporting Recommendation Mechanism

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become one of the most important activities on the Internet, such as Facebook and Google+. However, security and privacy have become major concerns in existing C/S based OSNs. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme called a Privacy-preserving Community-based P2P OSNs Using Broadcast Encryption Supporting Recommendation Mechanism (PCBE) that supports cross-platform availability in stringent privacy requirements. For the first time, we introduce recommendation mechanism into a privacy-preserving P2P based OSNs, in which we firstly employ the Open Directory Project to generate user interest model. We firstly introduce broadcast encryption into P2P community-based social networks together with reputation mechanism to decrease the system overhead. We formulate the security requirements and design goals for privacypreserving P2P based OSNs supporting recommendation mechanism. The RESTful web-services help to ensure crossplatform availability and transmission security. As a result, thorough security analysis and performance evaluation on experiments demonstrate that the PCBE scheme indeed accords with our proposed design goals. Keywords—community-based P2P OSNs; broadcast encryption; recommendation mechanism