Scramble!

Scramble!: Online Social Networks (OSN), such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Netlog ... have become for many the main Web 2.0 communication channel, replacing already other methods like email. OSNs allow people to share information in a large scale, with friends, family and other contacts. Not all of the information shared on Online Social Networks is meant to be seen by every user. OSNs allow users to define who was access to what data, but the configuration is difficult and constantly changing. There have been issues with bugs in the network software causing data to leak to unwanted recipients. Users who are looking for a robust solution to manage the access to their data should add an extra layer of security. We propose Scramble an OSN-independent Firefox Extension for private information sharing, that allows users to enforce access control over their data with their own privacy preferences. Scramble lets users define lists of authorised recipients for each piece of content. The definition of recipients lists is facilitated through the possibility of dynamically defining groups. In turn, the confidentiality and integrity of one data item is enforced with robust security based on cryptographic techniques. If a Scramble! user is visiting a OSN with protected content, the tool transparently decrypts and checks the integrity of the posted data.

Short Description: Scramble! allows not only for the definition of access control rules for audience segregation, but also for the support of their enforcement, on the context of the European PrimeLife project.
To support the definition of access control rules we develop concepts that are general enough to describe access control rights for a variety of different social networking sites. We also investigate different means for enforcing access control using encryption techniques.

The Firefox extension provides the enforcement mechanism. The extension knows about the users' access control preferences and enforces it using encryption techniques. For the future we plan to integrate the extension with different social networking sites to automatically obtain a list of a user's connections and their grouping into different audiences. This should reduce the configuration and key management effort that users need to invest before being able to use our system.