A user-to-user relationship-based access control model for online social networks

Abstract

Users and resources in online social networks (OSNs) are interconnected via various types of relationships. In particular, user-to-user relationships form the basis of the OSN structure, and play a significant role in specifying and enforcing access control. Individual users and the OSN provider should be allowed to specify which access can be granted in terms of existing relationships. We propose a novel user-to-user relationship-based access control (UURAC) model for OSN systems that utilizes regular expression notation for such policy specification. We develop a path checking algorithm to determine whether the required relationship path between users for a given access request exists, and provide proofs of correctness and complexity analysis for this algorithm. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.