Link Encryption to Counteract with Rouge Social Network Crawlers

Online social networking sites have changed the landscape of the internet. The increasing popularity of such sites leads to the aggregation of huge amount of personally identifiable and sensitive personal data online. Along with other security considerations, protection of such personal data is also coming under the responsibility of such service providers. Apart from traditional network attacks targeted on social networking sites, malicious crawlers possess greater threads to the online digital data. Today´s security mechanisms to deal with malicious crawlers are not mature and having their own limitations. This paper presents a link encryption primitive to counteract with such crawlers.