Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2020

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Computer And Information Sciences Degree

Department

Electrical Engineering And Computer Science

First Advisor

Zhu, Ye

Second Advisor

Nigamanth Sridhar

Third Advisor

Daniel Simon

Abstract

Recent scandals on online social networking have greatly raised privacy concerns on massive amount of personal information stored on social networking platforms. The privacy issues are rooted in the current design of online social networking. On one hand, users have to share their personal information with social networking service providers for networking. On the other hand, the sharing essentially allows the service providers to own the data, and the sharing may results in various privacy issues due to the business model of the service providers. In this thesis, we propose RemoraBook to solve the privacy issues in online social networking with Remora Computing, inspired by the remora fishes noted for traveling effortlessly by attaching themselves to large marine animals such as sharks. Remora Computing enables RemoraBook users to utilize facilities available from service providers to build social networks without sharing information to service providers. The networking function and messaging function of RemoraBook are implemented based on Facebook and Gmail facilities respectively. Our extensive experiments on RemoraBook show social networks can be reliably built in RemoraBook without significant degradation on usability.

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