Research

Confidant: Protecting OSN Data without Locking it Up

Online social networks (OSNs) are immensely popular, but their centralized control of user data raises important privacy concerns. Confidant provides a decentralized OSN framework which preserves user privacy while still enables scalable data processing. Confidant hooks the interface of Facebook in order to split data storage from it and leave it only for update notifications. Social relationships are exploited so that servers controlled by most trustworthy friends provide clear-text storage for the user's OSN data, which enables scalable data-processing framework. A light-weighted and free cloud service is introduced to help maintain data consistency and server availability.
Vis-à-Vis: Privacy-Preserving Online Social Networks via Virtual Individual Servers

Vis-à-Vis is a decentralized framework for OSNs based on the privacy-preserving notion of a VIS. A VIS is a personal virtual machine running in a paid compute utility. In Vis-à-Vis, a person stores her data on her own VIS, which arbitrates access to that data by others. VISs self-organize into overlay networks corresponding to social groups. We focus on preserving the privacy of location information in this project while the distributed tree structure can be generalized to store other sensitive OSN data.

Confidant: Protecting OSN Data without Locking it Up [PDF] [TR]
Dongtao Liu, Amre Shakimov, Ramón Cáceres, Alexander Varshavsky, and Landon P. Cox
To Appear in 12th International Middleware Conference (Middleware 2011)

Vis-à-Vis: Privacy-Preserving Online Social Networks via Virtual Individual Servers [PDF]
Amre Shakimov, Harold Lim, Ramón Cáceres, Landon P. Cox, Kevin Li, Dongtao Liu, and Alexander Varshavsky.
3rd International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS 2011)

Virtual Individual Servers as Privacy-Preserving Proxies for Mobile Devices [PDF]
Ramón Cáceres, Landon P. Cox, Harold Lim, Amre Shakimov, and Alexander Varshavsky.
1st ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Networking, Systems, Applications on Mobile Handhelds (MobiHeld 2009)

Privacy, Cost, and Availability Tradeoffs in Decentralized OSNs [PDF]
Amre Shakimov, Alexander Varshavsky, Landon P. Cox, and Ramón Cáceres.
2rd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Online Social Networks (WOSN 2009)