A Survey on Privacy and Security in Online Social Networks

TL;DR

This survey reviews privacy and security challenges in online social networks, categorizing attacks, discussing existing mitigation strategies, and highlighting ongoing challenges in protecting user data.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive taxonomy of attacks and summarizes current solutions and open challenges in OSN privacy and security.

Findings

Identifies two main attack types exploiting trust and harvesting data.

Summarizes existing solutions for privacy and security in OSNs.

Highlights unresolved challenges in OSN privacy protection.

Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSN) are a permanent presence in today's personal and professional lives of a huge segment of the population, with direct consequences to offline activities. Built on a foundation of trust-users connect to other users with common interests or overlapping personal trajectories-online social networks and the associated applications extract an unprecedented volume of personal information. Unsurprisingly, serious privacy and security risks emerged, positioning themselves along two main types of attacks: attacks that exploit the implicit trust embedded in declared social relationships; and attacks that harvest user's personal information for ill-intended use. This article provides an overview of the privacy and security issues that emerged so far in OSNs. We introduce a taxonomy of privacy and security attacks in OSNs, we overview existing solutions to mitigate those attacks, and outline challenges still to overcome.