Abstract
Data protection transgression due to lack of user’s awareness and concurrence about what personal data should or should not be shared is a subject of concern in this booming period of social networks. Social networks have a major contribution in the way we interact and exhaust the information available to us over the web. There is an unavoidable need of sharing personal data with regards to being connected with friends and family. However, even if the users are aware of sharing the data with the services they receive, they are unknown if their data is being passed to any third parties. The tool that should empower users with personal data protection has to face two problems: data privacy and control. This project aims to develop a social network application that enables end-to-end user data security in a way that the service provider does not have access to the user data. The user, upon registering with the application, will be able to share posts across the platform with desired restriction control. The post shared will be digitally signed by the creator to maintain the integrity of the data. Our application uses cloud-based relational database service, Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS), to store all plain and encrypted data generated through our application. The usage of blockchain helps in establishing a trusted space to publish and retrieve user information such as public keys. Additionally, by using Amazon Secrets Manager to store the users’ private keys, we address the security issue when we store private keys locally.