VirtualFriendship: Hiding interactions on Online Social Networks

The tremendous popularity of Online Social Networks (OSNs), such as Facebook and Google+, has accustomed people to an easy and reliable process of social interactions. Inherently, the huge amount of information disseminated and the sensitive information possessed by OSNs prompted several privacy concerns. In order to increase the privacy of OSNs users, several solutions proposed the use of encryption and masking techniques to conceal profile information or the content of exchanged messages. Unfortunately, even when such countermeasures are in place, the OSNs can still infer sensitive information based on the social network structure and the behavior of users. In this paper, we present VirtualFriendShip, a novel solution that allows users to hide their real social network structure, and to browse the OSNs while keeping their actions anonymous. To do so, we introduce the concept of routing friends, which are build upon the social trust and relay other users traffic throughout a decentralized channel. We demonstrate the feasibility of our solution via a prototype implementation of VirtualFriendShip for Facebook. Alongside with a set of experiments we show that the additional costs are tolerable to end users.