For some eyes only: protecting online information sharing

End-users have become accustomed to the ease with which online systems allow them to exchange messages, pictures, and other files with colleagues, friends, and family. This con- venience, however, sometimes comes at the expense of hav- ing their data be viewed by a number of unauthorized par- ties, such as hackers, advertisement companies, other users, or governmental agencies. A number of systems have been proposed to protect data shared online; yet these solutions typically just shift trust to another third party server, are platform specific (e.g., work for Facebook only), or fail to hide that confidential communication is taking place. In this paper, we present a novel system that enables users to exchange data over any web-based sharing platform, while both keeping the communicated data confidential and hiding from a casual observer that an exchange of confidential data is taking place. We provide a proof-of-concept implementa- tion of our system in the form of a publicly available Fire- fox plugin, and demonstrate the viability of our approach through a performance evaluation.