A collaborative access control framework for online social networks

Abstract

Online social networks (OSNs) are one of the most popular web-based services for people to communicate and share information with each other. With all their bene ts, OSNs might raise serious problems in what concerns users' privacy. One privacy risk is caused by accessing and sharing co-owned data items, i.e., when a user posts a data item that involves other users, some users' privacy may be disclosed, since users generally have di erent privacy preferences regarding who can access and share their data. Another risk is caused by the privacy settings o ered by OSNs that do not, in general, allow ne-grained enforcement, especially in cases where posted data items concern other users. We discuss and give examples of these issues, in order to illustrate their impacts on current OSNs' privacy protection mechanisms. We propose a collaborative access control framework to deal with such privacy issues. Basically, in our framework, the decision whether a user can access or share a co-owned data item is based on the aggregated opinion of all users involved. Our solution is based on the sensitivity level of users with respect to the concerned data item, the trust among users, the types of controllers (those who are concerned in making the collaborative decision) and the types of accessors (those who are identi ed to access a given data item or not). In order to observe how varying some of the parameters mentioned above in uence the outcome of the permitting/denying decision of the proposed solution, we provide an evaluation of our framework. We also present a proof-of-concept implementation of our approach in the open source OSN Diaspora.

A Dynamic and Automated Access Control Management System for Social Networks

“…Due to these reasons, there is a need for new conflict resolution strategies. In the paper [50], the researcher proposed a collaborative access control framework for OSNs which decides whether to allow or deny access to an object. It involves the privacy settings of the owner, originator, contributor, and others involved.…”

A smart access control mechanism based on user preference in online social networks

“…Alshareef et al 12 proposed a new collaborative access control framework, which considered the relationship between multiple users' views and shared items, and finally resolved the conflicts in users' privacy settings. In these frameworks, multi-party collaboration is necessary to reach consensus.…”

“…Rathore and Tripathy 11 proposed a trust‐based access control model, whose strategy is to extend its trust mechanism by aggregating policy specifications. Alshareef et al 12 proposed a new collaborative access control framework, which considered the relationship between multiple users' views and shared items, and finally resolved the conflicts in users' privacy settings. In these frameworks, multi‐party collaboration is necessary to reach consensus.…”

“…This section discusses several related work on ACMBUP and compares it with the scheme proposed in References 12, 15, and 39. We mainly compare the existing social access control mechanisms through eight evaluation metrics.…”

“…The scheme proposed in Reference 12 is based on multi‐user collaborative access control framework, which not only considers the trust between users, but also considers the sensitivity of users to the project, and solves the conflict of multiple user privacy settings. Project‐related users are difficult to define because there are many factors involved.…”