The enormous success and diffusion that online social networks (OSNs) are encountering nowadays is vastly apparent. Users' social interactions now occur using online social media as communication channels; personal information and activities are easily exchanged both for recreational and business purposes in order to obtain social or economic advantages. In this scenario, OSNs are considered critical applications with respect to the security of users and their resources, for their characteristics alone: the large amount of personal information they manage, big economic upturn connected to their commercial use, strict interconnection among users and resources characterizing them, as well as user attitude to easily share private data and activities with strangers. In this book, we discuss three main research topics connected to security in online social networks: (i) trust management, because trust can be intended as a measure of the perception of security (in terms of risks/benefits) that users in an OSN have with respect to other (unknown/little-known) parties; (ii) controlled information sharing, because in OSNs, where personal information is not only connected to user profiles, but spans across users' social activities and interactions, users must be provided with the possibility to directly control information flows; and (iii) identity management, because OSNs are subjected more and more to malicious attacks that, with respect to traditional ones, have the advantage of being more effective by leveraging the social network as a new medium for reaching victims. For each of these research topics, in this book we provide both theoretical concepts as well as an overview of the main solutions that commercial/non-commercial actors have proposed over the years. We also discuss some of the most promising research directions in these fields.
Barbara Carminati is an assistant professor in Computer Science at the University of Insubria, Italy. She has visited several foreign universities as a visiting researcher, including: National University of Singapore, University of Texas at Dallas, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and Tsinghua University, Beijng. Her main research interests are related to security and privacy for innovative applications, like semantic web, data outsourcing, web services, data streams, and online social networks. On these topics Barbara has published more than 60 publications in international journals and conference proceedings, and has been involved in several research projects. She is currently the principal investigator of a project funded by the European Office of Aerospace Research and Development (EOARD). Barbara is the Editor-in-Chief of the Computer Standards & Interfaces journal from Elsevier Press, and has been involved in the organization of several international conferences as a program committee member, as well as program and general chair.Elena Ferrari is a full professor of Computer Science at the University of Insubria, Italy, where she leads the STRICT SociaLab and is scientific director of the K&SM Research Center. Her research interests are related to various aspects of data management and analysis, including social networks and the social web, access control, privacy, trust, and cloud computing. She received the IEEE Computer Society's prestigious 2009 Technical Achievement Award for ""outstanding and innovative contributions to secure data management."" In 2011, she received a Google research award for her research on social network privacy. She is an IEEE Fellow and Distinguished Member of the ACM.Marco Viviani is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Insubria, Italy, on topics connected to Trust Management in the Social Web. He acquired a Ph.D. in Informatics from the University of Milan, Italy in February 2008. In 2009, he obtained a one-year postoctoral research fellow at the Universite de Bourgogne/Le2i (Dijon France). In 2010, he obtained a two-year postoctoral research fellow at the Institut National des Sciences Appliquees/Liris (Lyon, France). Marco Viviani has been involved in several research projects. His main topics of interest include Trust Management, Trust and Reputation Systems, Social Network Analysis, User Modeling, Knowledge Extraction and Management, Distributed Systems, and Fuzzy Logic. On these topics he has written several international publications.
