Author(s): Ravindra Zarekar, Rahul Patil
The wide use of online social networks (OSNs) such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc., where users interact with each other by sharing their personal information. On-line social network applications severely suffer from various security and privacy exposures. One of the important issues in OSNs is that how user privacy is protected because OSN providers have full control over users’ data. The OSN providers typically store users’ information permanently; the privacy controls mechanism in OSNs offer limited options to users for customizing, managing and defining access policies for their data over the network. An efficient privacy protection mechanism is important for OSNs that can be used to protect the privacy of online social relationships and users’ data from third parties. Cryptographic privacy protection mechanism shifts the control over data sharing back to the users by providing them with flexible and dynamic access policies. Also the proposed Validation Check Module focuses on handling the human attacks by providing an additional level of security, including auto-locking features to protect the user’s account in online social network. This mechanism provides enhanced security features from both automated program attacks and the human attacks.