Security Requirements for Social Networks in Web 2.0

Abstract

A social network is a structure of individuals or organizations, which are connected by one or more types of interdependency, such as friendship, affinity, common interests or knowledge. Social networks use now web 2.0 technology and the users may need to follow a series of restrictions or conditions to join or add contents. We look here at their context and threats, in order to ascertain their needs for security. We propose the use of patterns to specify these requirements in a precise way and we present two specific patterns. A pattern is an encapsulated solution to a software problem in a given context. We present here the Participation-Collaboration Pattern, which describes the functionality of the collaboration between users in applications and the Collaborative Tagging Pattern, which is useful to share content using keywords to tag bookmarks, photographs and other contents. We also discuss possible improvements to the current situation.