Ensuring data security in cloud based social networks

Abstract

Nowadays, Online Social Networks is one of the important terms we hear, which allows its users to connect by various link types. Everyday application developers come up with new social networking sites. Consequently, these websites gain huge profit just by providing a platform for the users to communicate. It has already become an important integral part of our daily lives, enabling us to contact our friends and families on time. Since the count of the users of social networks is increasing drastically, storage of such huge amount of data is difficult to accomplish. As a solution, Cloud provides a platform to store this tiny amount of data. More and more social network data has been made publicly available and analyzed in one way or another. However, the issues in securing the data and privacy of users in cloud-based social networks persist. Users are unaware of these issues. They share various pictures, videos and personal data on the networking site which prevail even after deletion. But some of the information revealed is meant to be private hence social network data has led to the risk of leakage of confidential information of individuals. This is because they collect huge personal data and users take risks of trusting them. Since more personalized information is shared with the public, violating the privacy of a target user become much easier. Hence, security of the social networking data stored in the cloud is one of the major issues in cloud-based social networks. In this paper, we propose a framework for secure storing of data on the cloud-based social networks. The framework encrypts the data before storing it in the cloud, and the data is decrypted only with the private key of the user, making the data secure in the cloud. The proxy re-encryption scheme is used to re-encrypt the data to make it more secure.