A Cloud-based Architecture for Mitigating Privacy
Issues in Online Social Networks
Mustafa Kaiiali1, Auwal Iliyasu2,
Ahmad Wazan3, Adib Habbal4, and Yusuf Muhammad5
1Centre for Secure
Information Technologies, Queen's University Belfast, UK
2The Department of Computer
Engineering, Kano State Polytechnic, Nigeria
3Département Informatique,
Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, France
4InterNetWorks Research Lab,
School of Computing, Universiti Utara Malaysia, Malaysia
5The Department of Computer Science, Saadatu Rimi College of Education,
Nigeria
Abstract: Online social media networks have revolutionized the
way information is shared across our societies and around the world.
Information is now delivered for free to a large audience within a short period
of time. Anyone can publish news and information and become a content creator
over the internet. However, along with these benefits is the privacy issue that
raises a serious concern due to incidences of privacy breaches in Online Social
Networks (OSNs). Various projects have been developed to protect users’ privacy
in OSNs. This paper discusses those projects and analysestheir pros and cons. Then it proposes a new
cloud-based model to shield up OSNs users against unauthorized disclosure of
their private data. The model supports both trusted (private) as well as
untrusted (3rd party) clouds. An efficiency analysis is provided at
the end to show that the proposed model offers a lot of improvements over
existing ones.
Keywords: Online social network, cloud computing, user’s privacy,
access control, broadcast encryption.