BDOSN: Privacy-aware Blockchain based Decentralized OSNs

Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSN) have progressed exponentially in terms of both participants and data being shared on the OSN. The OSN is more prevalent, and user profile on OSN has become the second identity in users’ life. The most popular and widely used OSN (i.e., Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) is built on a centralized architecture. The centralized OSN is designed around a centralized server, and users’ data are stored on the server. The centralized OSN poses the risk of a single point of failure, disclosure of sensitive information, and the user has little control over their sensitive data. The distributed OSNs are designed as a solution to single-point-of-failure and data privacy problems. However, it adduces inefficiencies in delivering essential functionalities such as unique identity distribution, data availability and access control services. This research work proposes a novel blockchain-based decentralized OSN (BDOSN) framework. The proposed BDOSN framework ensures data solitude and integrity of data. It also attains confirmable identity for the user and provides friends’ recommendations. Two smart contracts are designed to achieve useful functionalities in this research work. The potentiality of the proposed BDOSN scheme is implemented as an exemplification on solidity-Ethereum-blockchain using our dataset and publicly available data sets. The outcome of experiment illustrate the efficiency and validity of the proposed BDOSN.