Keeping information safe from social networking apps

  • Authors:
  • Bimal Viswanath;Emre Kiciman;Stefan Saroiu

  • Affiliations:
  • MPI-SWS, Kaiserslautern, Saarbruecken, Germany;Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA;Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2012 ACM workshop on Workshop on online social networks
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

The ability of third-party applications to aggregate and re-purpose personal data is a fundamental privacy weakness in today's social networking platforms. Prior work has proposed sandboxing in a hosted cloud infrastructure to prevent leakage of user information [22]. In this paper, we extend simple sandboxing to allow sharing of information among friends in a social network, and to help application developers securely aggregate user data according to differential privacy properties. Enabling these two key features requires preventing, among other subtleties, a new "Kevin Bacon" attack aimed at aggregating private data through a social network graph. We describe the significant architectural and security implications for the application framework in the Web (JavaScript) application, backend cloud, and user data handling.