A growing concern for end users of Online Social Networks (OSNs) is the privacy and control of user data due to the client-server architecture of the current ecosystems. In this paper, we introduce a privacy preserving decentralized OSN platform, which mimics real life social interactions. In particular, we decentralize the OSN platform and give direct control of the information to the user. Th...

Online social networks (OSNs) portray a multi-layer of interactions through which users become a friend, information is propagated, ideas are shared, and interaction is constructed within an OSN. Identifying the most influential spreaders in a network is a significant step towards improving the use of existing resources to speed up the spread of information for application such as viral marketi...

People tend to share private information with their friends on Online Social Networks (OSNs). The common position is that the shared information eventually reaches all users of the network since OSNs exhibit the small-world property. However, dissemination of private information in an OSN exhibits a set of factors that need to be accounted for in order to create more realistic models of the evo...

Today, many Internet users take part in online social networks (OSNs) like Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn, MySpace, studiVZ, and others. However, the motives for participation are multifaceted and stand in contrast to the motivation not to join OSNs because of the potential danger with respect to privacy aspects. This risk is already perceived by some OSN users but still underestimated. The naive han...

During recent years, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have evolved in many ways and attracted millions of users. The dramatic increase in the popularity of OSNs has encouraged network researchers to examine their connectivity structure. The majority of empirical studies for characterizing OSN connectivity graphs have analyzed snapshots of the system taken in different times. These snapshots are co...

Online Social Networks (OSN) are not only a popular communication and entertainment platform but also a means of self-representation. In this paper, we adopt an interdisciplinary approach combining Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and user-generated content classification techniques with a user-driven stress test as applied to a Greek community of OSN users. The main goal of the paper is to stu...

In this study we conduct experiments on a modified content delivery simulation framework, as we aspire to compare miscellaneous policies for dynamic OSN-aware content delivery. The incorporation of an OSN-aware dynamic mechanism becomes indispensable for CDN services, since (i)significantly large proportion of Internet traffic results from -easily produced via online media services and transmit...

Platforms for Big Data Analytics such as Hadoop, Spark, and Storm have gained large attention given their easy-touse programming model, scalability, and performance characteristics when processing large scale data in parallel. Along with the wide adoption of these big data platforms, Online Social Networks (OSN) have evolved as one of the major sources of information given the large amount of d...

Online Social Network (OSN) is an online social platform that enables people to exchange information, get in touch with family members or friends, and also helps as a marketing tool. However, OSN suffers from various security and privacy issues. Trust, fundamentally, is made up of security with hard trust (cryptographic mechanism) and soft trust (recommender system); user's trustworthiness for ...

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have rapidly become a prominent and widely used service, offering a wealth of personal and sensitive information with significant security and privacy implications. Hence, OSNs are also an important and popular subject for research. To perform research based on real-life evidence, however, researchers may need to access OSN data, such as texts and files uploaded by...