Network Architecture of the Proposed Secure Online Social Network
The figure below depicts a simplified illustration of the proposed online social network that shows several cloud datacenters (CDCs) and two users. The Advertiser is an online server that contains users' public profiles that can be searched and viewed by other users. In other words, it provides an indexing service for the online social network. The certificate authority certifies ITU-T X.509 based public-key certificates of all the entities in this architecture (users, CDCs, and the Advertiser(s)). In addition to certifying the certificates it also acts as a repository of public-key certificates and certificate revocation lists (CRLs). The proposed architecture allows for multiple certificate authorities and Advertisers. The security of all the communications to be acheived by SSL/TLS sessions.
To start off with, the proposed online social network is designed to support the following primary operations.
- User registration
- Creating user profile
- Accessing and updating a user profile
- Deleting a user profile
- Adding friends and contacts to the network
- Removing friends and contacts from the network
- Accessing friends' profiles
Furthermore, it supports following secondary functionalities as well.
- Searching for contacts according to different criteria
- Messaging
- Sharing information and content
- Wall posting
- Commenting on shared content