Cryptagram: photo privacy for online social media

While Online Social Networks (OSNs) enable users to share photos easily, they also expose users to several privacy threats from both the OSNs and external entities. The current privacy controls on OSNs are far from adequate, resulting in inappropriate flows of information when users fail to understand their privacy settings or OSNs fail to implement policies correctly. OSNs may further complicate privacy expectations when they reserve the right to analyze uploaded photos using automated face identification techniques. In this paper, we propose the design, implementation and evaluation of Cryptagram, a system designed to enhance online photo privacy. Cryptagram enables users to convert photos into encrypted images, which the users upload to OSNs. Users directly manage access control to those photos via shared keys that are independent of OSNs or other third parties. OSNs apply standard image transformations (JPEG compression) to all uploaded images so Cryptagram provides an image encoding and encryption mechanism that is tolerant to these transformations. Cryptagram guarantees that the recipient with the right credentials can completely retrieve the original image from the transformed version of the uploaded encrypted image while the OSN cannot infer the original image. Cryptagram's browser extension integrates seamlessly with preexisting OSNs, including Facebook and Google+, and currently has over 400 active users.