TY - GEN
T1 - Cachet
T2 - 8th ACM International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies, CoNEXT 2012
AU - Nilizadeh, Shirin
AU - Jahid, Sonia
AU - Mittal, Prateek
AU - Borisov, Nikita
AU - Kapadia, Apu
PY - 2012
Y1 - 2012
N2 - Online social networks (OSNs) such as Facebook and Google+ have transformed the way our society communicates. However, this success has come at the cost of user privacy; in today's OSNs, users are not in control of their own data, and depend on OSN operators to enforce access control policies. A multitude of privacy breaches has spurred research into privacy-preserving alternatives for social networking, exploring a number of techniques for storing, disseminating, and controlling access to data in a decentralized fashion. In this paper, we argue that a combination of techniques is necessary to efficiently support the complex functionality requirements of OSNs. We propose Cachet, an architecture that provides strong security and privacy guarantees while preserving the main functionality of online social networks. In particular, Cachet protects the confidentiality, integrity and availability of user content, as well as the privacy of user relationships. Cachet uses a distributed pool of nodes to store user data and ensure availability. Storage nodes in Cachet are untrusted; we leverage cryptographic techniques such as attribute-based encryption to protect the confidentiality of data. For efficient dissemination and retrieval of data, Cachet uses a hybrid structured-unstructured overlay paradigm in which a conventional distributed hash table is augmented with social links between users. Social contacts in our system act as caches to store recent updates in the social network, and help reduce the cryptographic as well as the communication overhead in the network. We built a prototype implementation of Cachet in the FreePastry simulator. To demonstrate the functionality of existing OSNs we implemented the 'newsfeed' application. Our evaluation demonstrates that (a) decentralized architectures for privacy preserving social networking are feasible, and (b) use of social contacts for object caching results in significant performance improvements.
AB - Online social networks (OSNs) such as Facebook and Google+ have transformed the way our society communicates. However, this success has come at the cost of user privacy; in today's OSNs, users are not in control of their own data, and depend on OSN operators to enforce access control policies. A multitude of privacy breaches has spurred research into privacy-preserving alternatives for social networking, exploring a number of techniques for storing, disseminating, and controlling access to data in a decentralized fashion. In this paper, we argue that a combination of techniques is necessary to efficiently support the complex functionality requirements of OSNs. We propose Cachet, an architecture that provides strong security and privacy guarantees while preserving the main functionality of online social networks. In particular, Cachet protects the confidentiality, integrity and availability of user content, as well as the privacy of user relationships. Cachet uses a distributed pool of nodes to store user data and ensure availability. Storage nodes in Cachet are untrusted; we leverage cryptographic techniques such as attribute-based encryption to protect the confidentiality of data. For efficient dissemination and retrieval of data, Cachet uses a hybrid structured-unstructured overlay paradigm in which a conventional distributed hash table is augmented with social links between users. Social contacts in our system act as caches to store recent updates in the social network, and help reduce the cryptographic as well as the communication overhead in the network. We built a prototype implementation of Cachet in the FreePastry simulator. To demonstrate the functionality of existing OSNs we implemented the 'newsfeed' application. Our evaluation demonstrates that (a) decentralized architectures for privacy preserving social networking are feasible, and (b) use of social contacts for object caching results in significant performance improvements.
KW - Caching
KW - Peer-to-peer systems
KW - Privacy
KW - Social networking
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84872002349&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84872002349&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2413176.2413215
DO - 10.1145/2413176.2413215
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84872002349
SN - 9781450317757
T3 - CoNEXT 2012 - Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies
SP - 337
EP - 348
BT - CoNEXT 2012 - Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies
Y2 - 10 December 2012 through 13 December 2012
ER -