Year: 2009
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Recent years have seen unprecedented growth in the popularity of social network systems, with Facebook being an archetypical example. The access control paradigm behind the privacy preservation mechanism of Facebook is distinctly different from such existing access control paradigms as Discretionary Access Control, Role-Based Access Control, Capability Systems, and Trust Management Systems. This work takes a first step in deepening the understanding of this access control paradigm, by proposing an access control model that formalizes and generalizes the privacy preservation mechanism of Facebook. The model can be instantiated into a family of Facebook-style social network systems, each with a recognizably different access control mechanism, so that Facebook is but one instantiation of the model. We also demonstrate that the model can be instantiated to express policies that are not currently supported by Facebook but possess rich and natural social significance. This work thus delineates the design space of privacy preservation mechanisms for Facebook-style social network systems, and lays out a formal framework for policy analysis in these systems.
Authors: Philip W. L. Fong, Mohd Anwar, Zhen Zhao
Institutions: University of Calgary, University of Regina
Language: English
Topic: Access Control and Trust
Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1555093693