We live in the age of social computing. Social networks are everywhere, exponentially increasing ... more We live in the age of social computing. Social networks are everywhere, exponentially increasing in volume, and changing everything about our lives, the way we do business, and how we understand ourselves and the world around us. The
This special issue collates a selection of representative research articles that were primarily p... more This special issue collates a selection of representative research articles that were primarily presented at the 9th International Conference on Network and System Security. This annual conference brings together researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry who are working on security and privacy in computer systems and social networks, in order to promote an exchange of ideas, discuss future collaborations, and develop new research directions. Online social networks have pervaded all aspects of our daily lives. With their unparalleled popularity, online social networks have evolved from platforms for social communication and news dissemination, to indispensable tools for professional networking, social recommendations, marketing, and online content distribution. Because of their scale, complexity, and heterogeneity, many technical and social challenges in online social networks must be addressed. It has been widely recognized that security and privacy are the critical issues in online social networks. This special issue presents many examples of how researchers, scholars, vendors, and practitioners are collaborating to address security and privacy research challenges. The scope of this special issue is broad and is representative of the multidisciplinary nature of privacy and security. In addition to submissions that deal with malicious attacks, information control and detection, privacy protection, network data analytics for security and privacy, trust and reputation in social networks, this issue also includes articles that address practical challenges with privacy-preserving data publishing and efficient data encryption schemes. Protecting the security and privacy of user data in the context of social networks is a central topic of this issue. Xiaofen Wang et al. [3] propose a new privacy-preserving data search and sharing protocol for social networks. The protocol leverages an ID-based multiuser searchable encryption scheme to achieve data search pattern privacy-preserving, anonymity, and request unlinkability. Majed Alrubian et al. [4] describe a novel approach for finding credible sources among Twitter social network users to detect and prevent various malicious activities. They combine analysis of the user's reputation on a given topic, as well as a measure of the user's sentiment to identify topically relevant and credible sources of information. Shuhong Chen et al. [9] propose a new multi-dimensional fuzzy trust evaluation method for mobile social networks. They construct implicit social behavioral graphs based on dynamic complex community structures to infer trust relations between users. Zechao Liu et al. [6] propose a new offline and online attribute-based encryption scheme with verifiable outsourced decryption. Using the proposed scheme, the majority of the computational workload in decryption can be outsourced to third parties. Chunyong Yin et al. [8] propose an improved anonymity model for big data security based on clustering algorithm. The model integrates K-anonymity with L-diversity and addresses the problem of imbalanced sensitive attribute distribution. The security and privacy issues under emerging scenarios, such as mobile and cloud computing, Internet of Things, etc., are interesting topics of this issue. Shasi Pokharel et al. [1] describe a new attacking method for codec identification and decoding of captured communications from 15 popular Android VoIP apps. Using this method, the authors can recover the original voice conversations from intercepted calls. Bowei Yang et al. [2] propose a Quality of Service-aware indiscriminate volume storage cloud scheme over dynamic networks. The scheme employs a data redundancy policy based on indiscriminate recovery volumes and Quality of Service-aware data replacement strategy. Keke Gai et al. [7] present a secure cyber incident analytics framework using Monte Carlo Simulations for financial cyber-security insurance in cloud computing. Jiageng Chen et al. [5] propose a novel variable message encryption scheme for constrained devices in Internet of Things. The authors present two different block cipher compression functions to satisfy efficiency and upper security bound, respectively.
In this work, we investigate the relationships between social network structure and personality; ... more In this work, we investigate the relationships between social network structure and personality; we assess the performances of different subsets of structural network features, and in particular those concerned with ego-networks, in predicting the Big-5 personality traits. In addition to traditional survey-based data, this work focuses on social networks derived from real-life data gathered through smartphones. Besides showing that the latter are superior to the former for the task at hand, our results provide a fine-grained analysis of the contribution the various feature sets are able to provide to personality classification, along with an assessment of the relative merits of the various networks exploited.
Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Progra... more Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 153-160).People are quite good at establishing a social style and using it in different communications contexts, but they do less well when the communication is mediated by computer networks. It is hard to control what information is revealed and how one's digital persona will be presented or interpreted. In this thesis, we ameliorate this problem by creating a "Virtual Private Milieu", a "VPM", that allows networked devices to act on our behalf and project a "digital aura" to other people and devices around us in a manner analogous to the way humans naturally interact with one another. The dynamic aggregation of the different auras and facets that the devices expose to one another creates social spheres of interaction between sets of active devices, and consequently between peopl...
In this paper we discuss the threat of malware targeted at extracting information about the relat... more In this paper we discuss the threat of malware targeted at extracting information about the relationships in a real-world social network as well as characteristic information about the individuals in the network, which we dub Stealing Reality. We present Stealing Reality, explain why it differs from traditional types of network attacks, and discuss why its impact is significantly more dangerous than that of other attacks. We also present our initial analysis and results regarding the form that an SR attack might take, with the goal of promoting the discussion of defending against such an attack, or even just detecting the fact that one has already occurred.
Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on Information in Networks (WIN'10), Sep 1, 2010
The Friends and Family study in the MIT Media Lab is a long-term mobile phone-based experiment th... more The Friends and Family study in the MIT Media Lab is a long-term mobile phone-based experiment that transforms a graduate family community into a living lab for social science investigation. Data from this study, collected via Android-based phones equipped with our software platform for passive data collection, will be used to look at issues including individual and group identity, real world decision making, social diffusion, social health, and boundaries of privacy. In this paper we give an overview of the study and highlight some ...
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
We have carefully instrumented a large portion of the population living in a university graduate ... more We have carefully instrumented a large portion of the population living in a university graduate dormitory by giving participants Android smart phones running our sensing software. In this paper, we propose the novel problem of predicting mobile application (known as “apps”) installation using social networks and explain its challenge. Modern smart phones, like the ones used in our study, are able to collect different social networks using built-in sensors. (e.g. Bluetooth proximity network, call log network, etc) While this information is accessible to app market makers such as the iPhone AppStore, it has not yet been studied how app market makers can use these information for marketing research and strategy development. We develop a simple computational model to better predict app installation by using a composite network computed from the different networks sensed by phones. Our model also captures individual variance and exogenous factors in app adoption. We show the importance ...
Partnership Ties Shape Friendship Networks Partnership Ties Shape Friendship Networks: A Dynamic Social Network Study
Partnership ties shape friendship networks through different social forces. First, partnership ti... more Partnership ties shape friendship networks through different social forces. First, partnership ties drive clustering in friendship networks: individuals who are in a partnership tend to have common friends and befriend other couples. Second, partnership ties influence the level of homophily in these emerging friendship clusters. Partners tend to be similar in a number of attributes (homogamy). If one partner selects friends based on preferences for homophily, then the other partner may befriend the same person regardless of whether they also have homophilic preferences. Thus, two homophilic ties emerge based on a single partner’s preferences. This amplification of homophily can be observed in many attributes (e.g., ethnicity, religion, age). Gender homophily, however, may be de-amplified, as the gender of partners differs in hetero-sexual partnerships. In our study, we follow dynamic friendship formation among 126 individuals and their cohabiting partners in a university-related gra...
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Papers by Nadav Aharony