Study On Relationship-based Access Control Model For Online Social Networks

Along with the explosive development of online social networks, problems suchas data sharing and privacy preservation are gradually grabbing the attention of thepublic. Access control is one of the important technologies applied to implementinginformation security. In online social networks, it achieves the goal of resourceprotection mainly by preventing legal users’ unauthorized access to protected webresources. As information security mechanism, traditional access control models areincompetent to meet the security requirements under the complex circumstances ofonline social networks. Recent years, research on access control models for onlinesocial networks is becoming a hot topic and many new access control models havebeen proposed based on different perspectives.Nowadays, studies on access control models for online social networks are mainlythe ones based on the relationships between registered users. They seized the corecharacteristic of social networks–relationships. But the relationship type is singular,too simple to cover the complex relationships between the nodes in social graph,especially under a trend of diversified online social networks applications. And theaccess control requirements of policy individualization, fine-grained controlment andflexibility are not properly fulfilled. Therefore, this paper takes the relationship-basedaccess control model for online social networks as the research interest and the mainresearch contents are as follows:①The research history and status of access control models for online socialnetworks is analyzed and summarized, and the key problems and challenges are alsopointed out for further studies.②The relationship-based access control model is chosen as a breakthrough pointand three relationship types which have effects on access control policy specificationare induced through intensive study on the social graph topology of online socialnetworks. They are relationships between users, relationships between user andresources and relationships between resources.③A relationship-based access control model for online social networks isformally defined, using extended regular expression as its policy specificationlanguage. The authorization policy specification and the access request evaluationprocedure for the model is also presented. ④Some popular use cases in online social networks are exhibited as samples ofthe authorization of access requests according to the presented access control model.