A New Access Control Scheme for Facebook-style Social Networks

Abstract: The popularity of online social networks (OSNs) makes the protection of users' private information an important but scientifically challenging problem. In the literature, relationship-based access control schemes have been proposed to address this problem. However, with the dynamic developments of OSNs, we identify new access control requirements which cannot be fully captured by the current schemes. In this paper, we focus on public information in OSNs and treat it as a new dimension which users can use to regulate access to their resources. We define a new OSN model containing users and their relationships as well as public information. Based on this model, we introduce a variant of hybrid logic for formulating access control policies. We exploit a type of category information and relationship hierarchy to further extend our logic for its usage in practice. In the end, we propose a few solutions to address the problem of information reliability in OSNs, and formally model collaborative access control in our access control scheme.