Privacy and security model for online social network (OSN) friend recommendation

Abstract

Today, online social network (OSN) is one of the widely used online communication platform. The technology innovation made easy access to this communication platform for each and every one. This platform generates an enormous amount of data each and every day. It includes personal information of the user. The one question arises how safe is the user data. The OSN providers stores critical information in decentralized locations where the data is being distributed between several numbers of servers and so the information is in the hands of whoever owns the server. This makes the data vulnerable to hacking or data theft. The user has little control over how their data being used. The OSN primary source of revenue is through the commercialization and monetization of the data. The OSN analysis the data to add or update their services according to the user interest. The OSN is all about socializing through communicating, sharing and making friends virtually. OSN providers are rapidly adopting the recommendation system into their applications to improvise friend recommendation. The paper briefly explains how trust calculation and homomorphic encryption are used to achieve security and privacy of the data in OSN.