Data-Centric Access Control Using Relationship-Shell : An Advanced Privacy Model for Social Network Services

For SNS users, access control of their information is an important issue. They control accessibility of their information in order to preserve privacy. However, current access control models do not completely protect private information. In most SNS, users are able to handle information located on their space(wall, mini-hompage, etc), not that located on others' space. In order to preserve privacy, it is necessary to allow users to control the information accessibility regardless of its location. In this paper, we show that current access control models do not guarantee privacy on others' space and propose a data-centric access control model using relationship-shell concept. In addition, we implement a prototype SNS system, named PokerFace, adopting the proposed model and show the privacy problem cannot occur in the system.