For some eyes only: protecting online information sharing
Proceedings of the third ACM conference on Data and application security and privacy
Message in a bottle: sailing past censorship
Proceedings of the 29th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
k-subscription: privacy-preserving microblogging browsing through obfuscation
Proceedings of the 29th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
DupLESS: server-aided encryption for deduplicated storage
SEC'13 Proceedings of the 22nd USENIX conference on Security
Toward strong, usable access control for shared distributed data
FAST'14 Proceedings of the 12th USENIX conference on File and Storage Technologies
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In the last several years, micro-blogging Online Social Networks (OSNs), such as Twitter, have taken the world by storm, now boasting over 100 million subscribers. As an unparalleled stage for an enormous audience, they offer fast and reliable centralized diffusion of pithy tweets to great multitudes of information-hungry and always-connected followers. At the same time, this information gathering and dissemination paradigm prompts some important privacy concerns about relationships between tweeters, followers and interests of the latter. In this paper, we assess privacy in today's Twitter-like OSNs and describe an architecture and a trial implementation of a privacy-preserving service called Hummingbird. It is essentially a variant of Twitter that protects tweet contents, hash tags and follower interests from the (potentially) prying eyes of the centralized server. We argue that, although inherently limited by Twitter's mission of scalable information-sharing, this degree of privacy is valuable. We demonstrate, via a working prototype, that Hummingbird's additional costs are tolerably low. We also sketch out some viable enhancements that might offer better privacy in the long term.