Abstract
Friendship relations are a defining property of online social networks. On the one hand, and beyond their cultural interpretation, they sustain access control mechanisms and are privacy-enhancing by limiting the proliferation of personal information. On the other hand, the publicity of friendship links is privacy-invasive. We outline a distributed authentication protocol based on hidden friendship links that has been suggested in earlier work. We then investigate its formalisation and, using model-checking, we carry out a mechanised analysis of the protocol that enables the revision and rectification of the earlier version. We thus demonstrate more generally how model-checking and epistemic logic can be used for the detection of privacy and security vulnerabilities in authentication protocols for social networks.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Armando, A., et al.: The AVISPA tool for the automated validation of internet security protocols and applications. In: Etessami, K., Rajamani, S.K. (eds.) CAV 2005. LNCS, vol. 3576, pp. 281–285. Springer, Heidelberg (2005). http://www.avispa-project.org/publications.html
Lowe, G.: An attack on the needham-schroeder public-key authentication protocol. Inf. Process. Lett. 56, 131–133 (1995)
Burrows, M., Abadi, M., Needham, R.: A logic of authentication. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 8, 18–36 (1990)
Brickley, D., Miller, L.: FOAF Vocabulary Specification 0.97. Namespace document, January 2010
Bonneau, J., Preibusch, S.: The privacy jungle: on the market for data protection in social networks. In: The Ninth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS 09), March 2009
Blanchet, B., Smyth, B.: ProVerif 1.85: Automatic Cryptographic Protocol Verifier, User Manual and Tutorial (2011)
Cohen, M., Dam, M.: A complete axiomatization of knowledge and cryptography. In: Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 2007), 10–12 July 2007, Wroclaw, Poland, pp. 77–88. IEEE Computer Society (2007)
Dam, M.: A little knowledge goes a bit further. invited talk. In: Annual Meeting of Priority Program RS3 – Reliably Secure Software Systems (2011)
Facebook. Updates on your new privacy tools (2009)
Federated Social Web Europe. Federated social architectures and protocols, privacy on the federated social web (2011)
FOAF project. The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project (2010)
Kammüller, F., Mapp, G., Patel, S., Sani, A.S.: Engineering security pro tocols with modelchecking – radius-sha256 and secured simple protocol. In: International Conference on Internet Monitoring and Protection, ICIMP’12 (2012)
Kammüller, F., Probst, C.W.: Invalidating policies using structural information. In: Workshop on Research in Insider Threats WRIT’13 - IEEE CS Security and Privacy Workshops, SPW (2013)
Lomuscio, A., Qu, H., Raimondi, F.: MCMAS: a model checker for the verification of multi-agent systems. In: Bouajjani, A., Maler, O. (eds.) CAV 2009. LNCS, vol. 5643, pp. 682–688. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
MySpace. Profile 2.0 launch - check it out :) (2008)
Preibusch, S., Beresford, A.R.: Establishing distributed hidden friendship relations. In: Seventeenth International Workshop on Security Protocols (2009)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Epistemic logic (2006)
Zheleva, E., Getoor, L.: To join or not to join: the illusion of privacy in social networks with mixed public and private user profiles. In: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW ’09), pp. 531–540. ACM, New York (2009)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kammüller, F., Preibusch, S. (2014). Privacy Analysis of a Hidden Friendship Protocol. In: Garcia-Alfaro, J., Lioudakis, G., Cuppens-Boulahia, N., Foley, S., Fitzgerald, W. (eds) Data Privacy Management and Autonomous Spontaneous Security. DPM SETOP 2013 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8247. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54568-9_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54568-9_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-54567-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-54568-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)