Safebook: Feasibility of transitive cooperation for privacy on a decentralized social network

Social networking services (SNS), which provide the application with the most probably highest growth rates in the Internet today, raise serious security concerns, especially with respect to the privacy of their users. Multiple studies have shown the vulnerability of these services to breaches of privacy and to impersonation attacks mounted by third parties, however the centralized storage at the providers of SNS represents an additional quite significant weakness that so far has not satisfyingly been addressed. In this paper we show the feasibility of “Safebook”, our proposal for the provision of a competitive social networking service, which solves these vulnerabilities by its decentralized design, leveraging on the real life relationships of its users and means of cryptography.