Arcana: Enabling private posts on public microblog platforms

Many popular online social networks, such as Twitter, Tumblr, and Sina Weibo, adopt too simple privacy models to satisfy users’ diverse needs for privacy protection. In platforms with no (i.e., completely open) or binary (i.e., “public” and “friends-only”) access control, users cannot control the dissemination boundary of the content they share. For instance, on Twitter, tweets in “public” accounts are accessible to everyone including search engines, while tweets in “protected” accounts are visible to all the followers. In this work, we present Arcana to enable fine-grained access control for social network content sharing. In particular, we target the Twitter platform and introduce the “private tweet” function, which allows users to disseminate particular tweets to designated group(s) of followers. Arcana employs Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-based Encryption (CP-ABE) to implement social circle detection and private tweet encryption so that access-controlled tweets are only readable by designated recipients. To be stealthy, Arcana further embeds the protected content as digital watermarks in image tweets. We have implemented the Arcana prototype as a Chrome browser plug-in, and demonstrated its flexibility and effectiveness. Different from existing approaches that require trusted third-parties or additional server/broker/mediator, Arcana is light-weight and completely transparent to Twitter – all the communications, including key distribution and private tweet dissemination, are exchanged as Twitter messages. Therefore, with small API modifications, Arcana could be easily ported to other online social networking platforms to support fine-grained access control.