SESOC 2012 4th International Workshop on SECurity and SOCial Networking - March 19th 2012 Lugano, Switzerland

http://www.sesoc.org

Online Social Networks arguably are the most accepted service on the
Web, today. Facebook alone has a claimed base of over 750 millons of
users world wide, google+ reached the mark of 10 million users in only
16 days after going public.
So far, Online Social Networks are self-contained, walled garden
services, which see next to no integration among each other at all. Yet,
the history of the Internet has shown that open and integrated services
on the long run prevail.
The future hence will see an open social layer on the web, and
enhancements of several services, which take the users and their
relationships into account. The problems of security and privacy in such
an environment are becoming more and more crucial. New communication
systems are becoming even more dynamic, open and heterogeneous, enriched
with social information. The emerging pervasive communication systems,
which, with high probability will more often than today face lack of
connectivity to central services, cannot rely on any a-priori knowledge,
on any pre-established trust relationship nor on sophisticated
integrated security infrastructures. They therefore are calling for new
and dedicated security and trust mechanisms. Moreover, observing the
current trends, future pervasive communication systems aim at supporting
social and collaborative communications: the evolving topologies are
expected to resemble the actual social networks of the communicating
users and information on their characteristics can be a powerful aid for
any network operation. Social networking services (facebook, linkedin,
xing, ...) may be leveraged for providing extended information on
contacts and their relations based on the containing online identities
and the information they share. However, this information, spanning
social relations and personal opinions, consist of highly sensitive data
at the same time, a fact that leads to a high risk of misuse or abuse.
New emerging technologies using some information on the social
characteristics of nodes raise entirely new privacy concerns and require
new reflections on security problems such as trust establishment,
cooperation enforcement or key management.

The aim of SESOC 2012 hence is to encompass research advances in all
areas of security, trust and privacy in pervasive communication systems
with a special focus on the social aspects of the services.