Logical key hierarchy for groups management in Distributed Online Social Network

Abstract

Distributed Online Social Networks (DOSNs) have recently been proposed to shift the control over user data from a unique entity to the users of the DOSN themselves. In this paper, we focus our attention on the problem of privacy preserving content sharing to a large group of users of the DOSNs. Several solutions, based on cryptographic techniques, have been recently proposed. The main challenge here is the definition of a scalable and decentralized approach that: i) minimizes the re-encryption of the contents published in a group when the composition of the group changes and ii) enables a fast distribution of the cryptographic keys to all the members (n) of a group, each time a new user is added or removed from the group by the group owner. Our solution achieves the above goals, providing performance unattained by our competitors. In particular, our approach requires only O(d·logn) encryption operations when the group membership changes (eviction), and only O(2·logn) when a join occurs (where d is an input parameter of the system). The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated by an experimental campaign carried out over a set of traces from a real online social network.