Relationship strength based access control in online social networks

Abstract

Online social networking site is a platform, where a person can communicate with others by creating his own profile. Lots of contents (e.g., photos, videos, etc.) are being generated every minute, because of its popularity. Generally, users do not want to share their all information with everyone as some of them are very sensitive, this raises privacy and confidentiality issues. So, Online Social Network (OSN) requires an effective and reliable access control mechanism to protect the users’ contents. This paper presents a novel Relationship Strength Based Access Control (RSBAC) mechanism which allow users to provide the access to their contents based on intimacy degree or closeness with respect to their friends. A reliable intimacy degree is calculated by considering the social activities and profile similarities between the friends. The content owner can make the access control policy by assigning different range of intimacy degrees. Users whose intimacy degrees are in the acceptable range, can access the contents.