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Limiting privacy leakage via third party apps

Description
The ability of third-party applications to aggregate and re-purpose personal data is a fundamental privacy weakness in today's social networking platforms. Prior work has proposed sandboxing in a hosted cloud infrastructure to prevent leakage of user information. In this work, we extend simple sandboxing to allow sharing of information among friends in a social network, and to help application developers securely aggregate user data according to differential privacy properties. Enabling these two key features requires preventing, among other subtleties, a new 'Kevin Bacon' attack aimed at aggregating private data through a social network graph. We explore the significant architectural and security implications of our design for the application framework in the Web (JavaScript) application, backend cloud, and user data handling.

 

Publications

Keeping Information Safe from Social Networking Apps
Bimal Viswanath, Emre Kiciman and Stefan Saroiu. ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Online Social Networks (WOSN), August 2012.

 

 

News

Saptarshi Ghosh is awarded a Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
July 2014

Mainack Mondal, Bimal Viswanath and Krishna Gummadi, along with their co-authors win SOUPS distinguished paper award
July 2014

Juhi Kulshrestha receives Google Anita Borg Scholarship
May 2013

Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil wins WWW best paper award
May 2013