Access Control in Social Networks: A reachability-Based Approach

Nowadays, social networks are attracting more and more users. These social network subscribers may share personal and sensitive information with a large number of possibly unknown other users, which is in constant evolution. This raises the need of giving users more control on the distribution of their shared content which can be accessed by a community far wider than they may expect. Our concern is to devise and enforce an appropriate access control model for online social networks that enables users to specify their privacy preferences in an expressive way, and, scales well over small, as well as, large social graphs (i.e., regardless to the size of the social graph). In this paper, we propose an access control model for online social networks based on connection characteristics between users, in an extended sense that includes indirect connections. This model provides a conditional access to shared resources based on reachability constraints, between the owner and the requester of a piece of information. Then, we describe the work that we have done to scale the access control enforcement performances over large social graphs. This paper describes PhD work carried out at Télécom ParisTech under the guidance of Talel Abdessalem