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Anonymous Short Communications over Social Networks

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Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2021)

Abstract

Social networks nowadays attract a huge number of people and are an extraordinary platform for applications going beyond the basic mission of connecting people. In this context, anonymity of senders and recipients of messages could play an important role to protect privacy in specific cases such as proximity-based services, surveys, crowdfunding, and e-democracy, in which only short communications should be protected. As the social network provider could be semi-trusted (i.e., honest-but-curious), it could play as global passive adversary, monitoring the flow of all the messages exchanged in the social network. In this paper, we propose a new anonymous communication protocol tailored to our application context. We show that our proposal offers a good solution to the trade-off between traffic overhead and communication latency, better than the application of existing anonymous overlay routing protocols.

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Acknowledgement

This paper is partially supported by Project POR FESR/FSE 14/20 Line A (Action 10.5.6) and Line B (Action 10.5.12).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Reggio Calabria, Via Graziella, Loc. Feo di Vito, Reggio Calabria, Italy

    Francesco Buccafurri, Vincenzo De Angelis, Maria Francesca Idone & Cecilia Labrini

Authors
  1. Francesco Buccafurri
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  2. Vincenzo De Angelis
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  3. Maria Francesca Idone
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  4. Cecilia Labrini
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Francesco Buccafurri .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Télécom SudParis, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, France

    Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro

  2. University of Kent Canterbury, Canterbury, Kent, UK

    Shujun Li

  3. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Radha Poovendran

  4. Télécom SudParis, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, France

    Hervé Debar

  5. Google Inc., New York, NY, USA

    Moti Yung

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© 2021 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Buccafurri, F., De Angelis, V., Idone, M.F., Labrini, C. (2021). Anonymous Short Communications over Social Networks. In: Garcia-Alfaro, J., Li, S., Poovendran, R., Debar, H., Yung, M. (eds) Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. SecureComm 2021. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 399. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90022-9_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90022-9_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-90021-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-90022-9

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