Cloud Assisted Personal Online Social Network

The usage of Online Social Networks (OSN) has grown immensely in the last few years. As more sensitive data is shared through OSN services, preserving privacy has become a major issue for the users of these systems. Most OSNs rely on a centralized architecture, which has the major drawback of privacy and control of the data. While decentralized architectures can provide better privacy to the users by removing the central authority, they have performance issues in dissemination of the content. In this study, we present a privacy preserving decentralized Personal Online Social Network (POSN) platform that implements a cloud-backed peer-to-peer decentralized OSN using mobile devices. In POSN, each user utilizes a storage cloud to store and distribute encrypted content to his/her friends. Direct key management allows the user to have fine-grained access control of the shared content, and protects the data from being accessed by third parties. We also performed a feasibility study to assess whether storage clouds can provide speeds comparable to centralized popular OSNs at various locations. Our evaluations across storage cloud providers indicates that, while OSNs are slightly more efficient for very small data transfers as OSN are optimized for such communication, storage clouds can sustain a similar data transfer performance to popular OSNs especially when considering multimedia. Hence, in POSN design, we utilize device-to-device communication for small data transfers and rely on cloud storage for sharing of larger multimedia. The developed POSN prototype is available at https://github.com/posn/POSN-app.