Publishing personal content on the web is gaining increased popularity with dramatic growth in social networking websites, and availability of cheap personal domain names and hosting services. Although the Internet enables easy publishing of any content intended to be generally accessible, restricting personal content to a selected group of contacts is more difficult. Social networking websites partially enable users to restrict access to a selected group of users of the same network by explicitly creating a "friends' list." While this limited restriction supports users' privacy on those (few) selected websites, personal websites must still largely be protected manually by sharing passwords or obscure links. Our focus is the general problem of privacy-enabled web content sharing from any user-chosen web server. By leveraging the existing "circle of trust" in popular Instant Messaging (IM) networks, we propose a scheme called IM-based Privacy-Enhanced Cont...
Mohammad Mannan, Paul C. van Oorschot