A privacy-preserving community-based P2P OSNs using broadcast encryption supporting recommendation mechanism

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become one of the most important activities on the Internet, such as Facebook and Google+. However, security and privacy have become major concerns in existing C/S based OSNs. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme called a Privacy-preserving Community-based P2P OSNs Using Broadcast Encryption Supporting Recommendation Mechanism (PCBE) that supports cross-platform availability in stringent privacy requirements. For the first time, we introduce recommendation mechanism into a privacy-preserving P2P based OSNs, in which we firstly employ the Open Directory Project to generate user interest model. We firstly introduce broadcast encryption into P2P community-based social networks together with reputation mechanism to decrease the system overhead. We formulate the security requirements and design goals for privacy-preserving P2P based OSNs supporting recommendation mechanism. The RESTful web-services help to ensure cross-platform availability and transmission security. As a result, thorough security analysis and performance evaluation on experiments demonstrate that the PCBE scheme indeed accords with our proposed design goals.