PRESENTATION

font color=red> Due to several requests, the paper submission deadline has been extended to November 7th 2011.

Online Social Networks arguably are the most accepted service on the Web, today. Facebook alone has a claimed base of over 750 millons of users world wide, google+ reached the mark of 10 million users in only 16 days after going public.

So far, Online Social Networks are self-contained, walled garden services, which see next to no integration among each other at all. Yet, the history of the Internet has shown that open and integrated services on the long run prevail.

The future hence will see an open social layer on the web, and enhancements of several services, which take the users and their relationships into account. The problems of security and privacy in such an environment are becoming more and more crucial. New communication systems are becoming even more dynamic, open and heterogeneous, enriched with social information. The emerging pervasive communication systems, which, with high probability will more often than today face lack of connectivity to central services, cannot rely on any a-priori knowledge, on any pre-established trust relationship nor on sophisticated integrated security infrastructures. They therefore are calling for new and dedicated security and trust mechanisms. Moreover, observing the current trends, future pervasive communication systems aim at supporting social and collaborative communications: the evolving topologies are expected to resemble the actual social networks of the communicating users and information on their characteristics can be a powerful aid for any network operation. Social networking services (facebook, linkedin, xing, ...) may be leveraged for providing extended information on contacts and their relations based on the containing online identities and the information they share. However, this information, spanning social relations and personal opinions, consist of highly sensitive data at the same time, a fact that leads to a high risk of misuse or abuse. New emerging technologies using some information on the social characteristics of nodes raise entirely new privacy concerns and require new reflections on security problems such as trust establishment, cooperation enforcement or key management.

The aim of SESOC 2012 hence is to encompass research advances in all areas of security, trust and privacy in pervasive communication systems with a special focus on the social aspects of the services.