SecureCSocial : Secure Cloud-Based Social Network

The use of online social networks (OSNs) has grown exponentially in recent years, and these OSNs continue to have an ever-increasing impact on human lives. There are many concerns regarding the privacy of users in these environments, such as how trustworthy the social network operators (SNOs) are.

This book presents a way to tackle the security and privacy issues in current OSNs through a new framework for online social networking, based on distributed cloud-based datacenters (CDCs) and using Shamir's secret sharing (SSS) as the method of encrypting user profile data. The framework aims to fulfill two contradictory goals: maintaining the utility of an OSN and preserving privacy of its users. The key feature of the framework lies in relinquishing control of a central authority over user's data (which is what usually happens in the current OSNs, e.g. Facebook keeps all our data) and distributing it to multiple CDCs in encrypted form. The use of SSS ensures perfect security, which means that the security of data does not rely on any unproven computational assumptions.

In this unique book, SNOs are considered as an adversary instead of external adversary. This paves the way for researchers to think beyond the privacy setting mechanism within an OSN to protect users' data.

Pradeep K Atrey is an Associate Professor at the State University of New York, Albany,NY, USA. He is also the Director of the computer science undergraduate program and the founding co-Director of the Albany Lab for Privacy and Security (ALPS). His current research interests are in the area of security and privacy with a focus on multimedia surveillance and privacy, multimedia security, secure-domain cloud-based large-scale multimedia analytics, and social media. He has authored/co-authored over 130 research articles at reputed ACM, IEEE, and Springer journals and conferences.

Dr Atrey is on the editorial board of several journals including ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (TOMM), Elsevier's Signal Processing: Image Communication, and ETRI Journal published by Wiley. He has been associated with over 60 international conferences/workshops in various roles such as General Chair, Program Chair, Area Chair, Publicity Chair, Web Chair, Demo Chair, and TPC Member. Atrey was a recipient of several awards, including the ACM TOMMAssociate Editor of the Year (2015), the IEEE Comm. Soc. MMTC Best RLetter Editor Award (2015), the Erica and Arnold Rogers Award for Excellence in Research and Scholarship (2014), ETRI Journal Best Editor Award (2012), and ETRI Journal Best Reviewer Award (2009). He was also recognized as the ACM Multimedia Rising Star(2015), the ICME Outstanding Organizing Committee Member (as Publicity Chair) (2013), and the ICME Quality Reviewer (2011).

Kasun Senevirathna is currently working as an Information Systems Business Analyst for the Winnipeg Police Service. He graduated from The University of Winnipeg with a master's degree in Applied Computer Science and also holds an MBA in Management of Technology and a BSc in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering from The University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Kasun has worked as a researcher and a professional in the domains of information security and privacy, data networks, wireless broadband networks, and project management.