Analysis of key management protocols for social networks

Key management protocols play a major role in achieving data privacy in social networks because of the frequent addition and removal of users. Considering this, a remote storage service-key management protocol (RSS-KMP) is proposed in this paper and analysed the performance with respect to client addition and removal. RSS-KMP uses two keys, group key and content encryption/decryption key. Content decryption key will be encrypted using the group key and kept in social network service provider's storage. Group key will be distributed to the clients or stored in the social network service provider storage securely. Each client gets or receives the group key to get the data decryption key further to decrypt data. To achieve re-key distribution efficiency, clients are grouped according to their nature of relationship and relationship trust levels. This paper also categorizes the social network items into sensitive and non-sensitive to give an idea to clients about items privacy requirement. Finally, paper analysed existing key management protocols and the proposed RSS-KMP with respect to storage, message and encryption to show the proposed protocol efficiency.