Future Directions in Access Control for Online Social Networks

Access control is the process by which authorized users are granted permission over resources. Access control models incorporate application requirements in their design and thus evolve with the applications. The rise of online social networks (OSN), like Facebook, has posed new requirements over the privacy of users’ data due to the presence of heterogeneous privacy circle. The traditional models cannot be used for this new type of applications for the complexity of millions of users interacting with each other. Different access control models for OSN are proposed based on relationships, trust, rule semantics, or history between the user and the requestor, however, rights delegation, rights transfer, reputation management and transparency are still ignored by the research community. To address these concerns and challenges, further research is needed. This paper reviews these challenges and presents a number of future research directions for access control models in the context of OSN.