Brief Announcement: Towards Secured Distributed Polling in Social Networks

Abstract

Social networks are growing exponentially, and one of the most celebrated examples, Facebook, currently boasts more than 250 million users. A particularly important task in such networks is polling, such as the recent one about the terms of service of Facebook [1]. A defining characteristic of such networks is the one to one mapping between social network identities and real ones (as opposed to virtual world platforms such as SecondLife). Participants in social networks are respectable, that is they do care about their reputation: information related to a user is considered to reflect intimately on the associated real person. We claim that leveraging the fact that users of social networks are concerned over their reputation, we can achieve polling in a distributed manner in the presence of malicious users without the use of heavyweight cryptography.