A Logical Approach to Restricting Access in Online Social Networks

Nowadays in popular online social networks users can blacklist some of their friends in order to disallow them to access resources that other non-blacklisted friends may access. We identify three independent binary decisions to utilize users’ blacklists in access control policies, resulting into eight access restrictions. We formally define these restrictions in a hybrid logic for relationship-based access control, and provide syntactical transformations to rewrite a hybrid logic access control formula when fixing an access restriction. This enables a flexible and user-friendly approach for restricting access in social networks. We develop efficient algorithms for enforcing a subset of access control policies with restrictions. The effectiveness of the access restrictions and the efficiency of our algorithms are evaluated on a Facebook dataset. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.6.5 [Management of Computing and Information Systems]: Security and Protection Keywords Online soci...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: SACMAT
• Authors: Marcos Cramer, Jun Pang, Yang Zhang
• Keywords: Control Systems, SACMAT 2015