London, Sep 14 (ANI): Social networks like Facebook may be posing dangers for social networking fanatics as they can help users conceal their actual identities and assist to better anonymous online interactions, anonymity researchers have suggested.
To thwart eavesdroppers, researchers from the University of Texas, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign took advantage of a unique property of Facebook: its ability to connect you to friends.
"The incorporation of social trust will likely be an important consideration in the design of the next generation of deployed anonymity systems," the researchers have said.
Their system, called Pisces, uses graphs of social network connections to make sure that only trusted nodes are used to make the random circuit, providing a safe route to the internet that excludes snooper nodes.
Existing anonymity tools, such as Tor, work by routing a user's internet traffic through a random chain of other computers called a circuit, the report said.
However, Pisces's reliance on social connections does confer some disadvantages. First, it won't work for users without a reasonably wide social network and also requires users' social contacts to participate, although the researchers are trying to use friends-of-friends in the trust network to improve both of these issues, the report said. (ANI)
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