How far removed are you? Scalable privacy-preserving estimation of social path length with Social PaL

Marcin Nagy, Thanh Bui, Emiliano De Cristofaro, N. Asokan, Jörg Ott, Ahmad Reza Sadeghi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Social relationships are a natural basis on which humans make trust decisions. Online Social Networks (OSNs) are increasingly often used to let users base trust decisions on the existence and the strength of social relationships. While most OSNs allow users to discover the length of the social path to other users, they do so in a centralized way, thus requiring them to rely on the service provider and reveal their interest in each other. This paper presents Social PaL, a system supporting the privacy-preserving discovery of arbitrary-length social paths between any two social network users. We overcome the bootstrapping problem encountered in all related prior work, demonstrating that Social PaL allows its users to find all paths of length two and to discover a significant fraction of longer paths, even when only a small fraction of OSN users is in the Social PaL system - e.g., discovering 70% of all paths with only 40% of the users. We implement Social PaL using a scalable server-side architecture and a modular Android client library, allowing developers to seamlessly integrate it into their apps.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, WiSec 2015
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
ISBN (Electronic)9781450336239
DOIs
StatePublished - 22 Jun 2015
Externally publishedYes
Event8th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, WiSec 2015 - New York, United States
Duration: 22 Jun 201526 Jun 2015

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, WiSec 2015

Conference

Conference8th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks, WiSec 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew York
Period22/06/1526/06/15

Keywords

  • Mobile social networks
  • Privacy
  • Proximity

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