Invited Talk 1 - Refik Molva (EURECOM, France)

Privacy in Social Networks: Can P2P help?

Widespread adoption of On-line Social Networks is due to the ease of communication offered by popular applications like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn that allow even users with limited technical skills to share a wide range of personal information with a theoretically unlimited number of partners. This advantage comes at the cost of increased security and privacy exposures since users tend to disclose private personal information with little guard and existing OSN applications severely suffer from vulnerabilities in their privacy protection or simply the lack thereof. An orthogonal privacy problem with current OSN applications is the fact that in all existing commercial OSN applications the service provider that runs the OSN application has access to all the data stored and managed by the OSN application. Potential misuse of the private information stored in the OSN by the OSN provider or through some unauthorized third parties can be viewed as major threat to the privacy of indivudual users and companies alike. Taking an approach that is radically different than the one of commercial OSN applications, several researchers recently proposed to design the OSN application in a decentralized way by leveraging the basic features of peer-to-peer architectures in order to avoid centralized control over users' data. The talk will outline the main features of Safebook that is a peer-to-peer OSN developed at EURECOM and tackle some key performance and privacy issues of peer-to-peer OSN based on Safebook protocols, trying to point some inherent trade-off between performance and privacy in peer-to-peer OSN. Extending beyond privacy in OSN, further examples on security solutions based on the peer-to-peer paradigm, such as anonymous communications and usage control will be sketched by revisiting some well-known hard problems in security.