Today’s social networking services require users to trust the service provider with the confidentiality and integrity of their data. But with their history of data leaks and privacy controversies, these services are not always deserving of this trust. Indeed, a malicious provider could not only violate users ’ privacy, it could equivocate and show different users divergent views of the system’s state. Such misbehavior can lead to numerous harms including surreptitious censorship. In light of these threats, this paper presents Frientegrity, a framework for social networking applications that can be realized with an untrusted service provider. In Frientegrity, a provider observes only encrypted data and cannot deviate from correct execution without being detected. Prior secure social networking systems have either been decentralized, sacrificing the availability and convenience of a centralized provider, or have focused almost entirely on users ’ privacy while ignoring the threat of equivocation. On the other hand, existing systems that are robust to equivocation do not scale to the needs social networking applications in which users may have hundreds of friends, and in which users are mainly interested the latest updates, not in the thousands that may have come before. To address these challenges, we present a novel method for detecting provider equivocation in which clients collaborate to verify correctness. In addition, we introduce an access control mechanism that offers efficient revocation and scales logarithmically with the number of friends. We present a prototype implementation demonstrating that Frientegrity provides latency and throughput that meet the needs of a realistic workload. 1.

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Authenticated dictionaries are a widely discussed paradigm to enable verifiable integrity for data storage on untrusted servers, such as today’s widely used “cloud computing ” resources, allowing a server to provide a “proof, ” typically in the form of a slice through a cryptographic data structure, that the results of any given query are the correct answer, including that the absence of a query result is correct. Persistent authenticated dictionaries (PADs) further allow queries against older versions of the structure. This research presents implementations of a variety of different PAD algorithms, some based on Merkle tree-style data structures and others based on individually signed “tuple ” statements (with and without RSA accumulators). We present system throughput benchmarks, presenting costs in terms of time, storage, and bandwidth as well as considering how much money would be required given standard cloud computing costs. We conclude that Merkle tree PADs are preferable in cases with frequent updates, while tuple-based PADs are preferable with higher query rates. For Merkle tree PADs, red-black trees outperform treaps and skiplists. Applying Sarnak-Tarjan’s versioned node strategy, with a cache of old hashes at every node, to red-black trees yields the fastest Merkle tree PAD implementation, notably using half the memory of the more commonly used applicative path copying strategy. For tuple PADs, although we designed and implemented an algorithm using RSA accumulators that offers constant update size, constant storage per update, constant proof size, and sublinear computation per update, we found that RSA accumulators are so expensive that they are never worthwhile. We find that other optimizations in the literature for tuple PADs are more cost-effective.

Today’s social networking services require users to trust the service provider with the confidentiality and integrity of their data. But with their history of data leaks and privacy controversies, these services are not always deserving of this trust. Indeed, a malicious provider could not only violate users ’ privacy, it could equivocate and show different users divergent views of the system’s state. Such misbehavior can lead to numerous harms including surreptitious censorship. In light of these threats, this paper presents Frientegrity, a framework for social networking applications that can be realized with an untrusted service provider. In Frientegrity, a provider observes only encrypted data and cannot deviate from correct execution without being detected. Prior secure social networking systems have either been decentralized, sacrificing the availability and convenience of a centralized provider, or have focused almost entirely on users ’ privacy while ignoring the threat of equivocation. On the other hand, existing systems that are robust to equivocation do not scale to the needs social networking applications in which users may have hundreds of friends, and in which users are mainly interested the latest updates, not in the thousands that may have come before. To address these challenges, we present a novel method for detecting provider equivocation in which clients collaborate to verify correctness. In addition, we introduce an access control mechanism that offers efficient revocation and scales logarithmically with the number of friends. We present a prototype implementation demonstrating that Frientegrity provides latency and throughput that meet the needs of a realistic workload. 1.

From word processing to online social networking, user-facing applications are increasingly being deployed in the cloud. These cloud services are attractive because they offer high scalability, availability, and reliability. But adopting them has so far forced users to cede control of their data to cloud providers, leaving the data vulnerable to misuse by the providers or theft by attackers. Thus, users have had to choose between trusting providers or forgoing cloud deployment’s benefits entirely. In this article, we show that it is possible to overcome this trade-off for many applications. We describe two of our recent systems, SPORC [13] and Frientegrity [12], that enable users to benefit from cloud deployment without having to trust providers for confidentiality or integrity. In both systems, the provider only observes encrypted data and cannot deviate from correct execution without detection. Moreover, for cases when the provider does misbehave, SPORC introduces a mechanism, also applicable to Frientegrity, that enables users to recover. SPORC is a framework that enables a wide variety of collaborative applications such as collaborative text editors and shared calendars with an untrusted provider. It allows concurrent, low-latency editing of shared state, permits disconnected operation, and supports dynamic access control even in the presence of concurrency. Frientegrity extends SPORC’s model to online social networking. It introduces novel mechanisms for verifying the provider’s correctness and access control that scale to hundreds of friends and tens of thousands of posts while still providing the same security guarantees as SPORC. By effectively returning control of users ’ data to the users themselves, these systems do much to mitigate the risks of cloud deployment. 1