Security and Privacy in Social Networks brings to the forefront innovative approaches for analyzing and enhancing the security and privacy dimensions in online social networks, and is the first comprehensive attempt dedicated entirely to this field. In order to facilitate the transition of such methods from theory to mechanisms designed and deployed in existing online social networking services, the book aspires to create a common language between the researchers and practitioners of this new area- spanning from the theory of computational social sciences to conventional security and network engineering.

This volume aims at assessing the current approaches and technologies, as well as to outline the major challenges and future perspectives related to the security and privacy protection of social networks. It provides the reader with an overview of the state-of-the art techniques, studies, and approaches as well as outlining future directions in this field. A wide range of interdisciplinary contributions from various research groups ensures for a balanced and complete perspective.

The enormous success and diffusion that online social networks (OSNs) are encountering nowadays is vastly apparent. Users' social interactions now occur using online social media as communication channels; personal information and activities are easily exchanged both for recreational and business purposes in order to obtain social or economic advantages. In this scenario, OSNs are considered critical applications with respect to the security of users and their resources, for their characteristics alone: the large amount of personal information they manage, big economic upturn connected to their commercial use, strict interconnection among users and resources characterizing them, as well as user attitude to easily share private data and activities with strangers. In this book, we discuss three main research topics connected to security in online social networks: (i) trust management, because trust can be intended as a measure of the perception of security (in terms of risks/benefits) that users in an OSN have with respect to other (unknown/little-known) parties; (ii) controlled information sharing, because in OSNs, where personal information is not only connected to user profiles, but spans across users' social activities and interactions, users must be provided with the possibility to directly control information flows; and (iii) identity management, because OSNs are subjected more and more to malicious attacks that, with respect to traditional ones, have the advantage of being more effective by leveraging the social network as a new medium for reaching victims. For each of these research topics, in this book we provide both theoretical concepts as well as an overview of the main solutions that commercial/non-commercial actors have proposed over the years. We also discuss some of the most promising research directions in these fields.

This book focuses on three emerging research topics in mobile social networks (MSNs): privacy-preserving profile matching (PPM) protocols, privacy-preserving cooperative data forwarding (PDF) protocols, and trustworthy service evaluation (TSE) systems. The PPM helps two users compare their personal profiles without disclosing the profiles. The PDF helps users forward data to their friends via multiple cooperative relay peers while preserving their identity and location privacy. The TSE enables users to locally share service reviews on the vendors such that users receive more valuable information about the services not only from vendors but also from their trusted social friends. The authors address both theoretic and practical aspects of these topics by introducing the system model, reviewing the related works, and presenting the solutions. Security and Privacy for Mobile Social Networks further provides the security analysis and the performance evaluation based on real-trace simulations. It also summarizes the future research directions for this rapidly growing area of research. The book will be valuable for researchers and practitioners who work with mobile social networks, communication platforms, wireless communication techniques, and internet applications. "Suitable for any type of reader as an introduction to the topic... The chapters are well motivated and presented... It is recommended for researchers." -ACM Computing Reviews, 21 July 2014

This synthesis lecture provides a survey of work on privacy in online social networks (OSNs). This work encompasses concerns of users as well as service providers and third parties. Our goal is to approach such concerns from a computer-science perspective, and building upon existing work on privacy, security, statistical modeling and databases to provide an overview of the technical and algorithmic issues related to privacy in OSNs. We start our survey by introducing a simple OSN data model and describe common statistical-inference techniques that can be used to infer potentially sensitive information. Next, we describe some privacy definitions and privacy mechanisms for data publishing. Finally, we describe a set of recent techniques for modeling, evaluating, and managing individual users' privacy risk within the context of OSNs. Table of Contents: Introduction / A Model for Online Social Networks / Types of Privacy Disclosure / Statistical Methods for Inferring Information in Networks / Anonymity and Differential Privacy / Attacks and Privacy-preserving Mechanisms / Models of Information Sharing / Users' Privacy Risk / Management of Privacy Settings

This book constitutes revised and selected papers from the 5th International Symposium on Security and Privacy in Social Networks and Big Data, SocialSec 2019, held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in July 2019. The 18 full papers and 3 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 76 submissions. The papers in the volume cover a broad range of topics on security in Internet-of-things, Social Networks, User Authentication, Algorithm design, Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data.

This book constitutes revised and selected papers from the 6th International Symposium on Security and Privacy in Social Networks and Big Data, SocialSec 2020, held in Tianjin, China, in September 2020. The 38 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 111 submissions. The papers are organized according to the topical sections on big data security; social networks; privacy-preserving and security.

This book is the second of three volumes that illustrate the concept of social networks from a computational point of view. The book contains contributions from a international selection of world-class experts, concentrating on topics relating to security and privacy (the other two volumes review Tools, Perspectives, and Applications, and Mining and Visualization in CSNs). Topics and features: presents the latest advances in security and privacy issues in CSNs, and illustrates how both organizations and individuals can be protected from real-world threats; discusses the design and use of a wide range of computational tools and software for social network analysis; describes simulations of social networks, and the representation and analysis of social networks, with a focus on issues of security, privacy, and anonymization; provides experience reports, survey articles, and intelligence techniques and theories relating to specific problems in network technology.

The social benefit derived from Online Social Networks (OSNs) can lure users to reveal unprecedented volumes of personal data to an online audience that is much less trustworthy than their offline social circle. Even if a user hides his personal data from some users and shares with others, privacy settings of OSNs may be bypassed, thus leading to various privacy harms such as identity theft, stalking, or discrimination. Therefore, users need to be assisted in understanding the privacy risks of their OSN profiles as well as managing their privacy settings so as to keep such risks in check, while still deriving the benefits of social network participation. This book presents to its readers how privacy risk analysis concepts such as privacy harms and risk sources can be used to develop mechanisms for privacy scoring of user profiles and for supporting users in privacy settings management in the context of OSNs. Privacy scoring helps detect and minimize the risks due to the dissemination and use of personal data. The book also discusses many open problems in this area to encourage further research.