Privacy-driven access control in social networks by means of automatic semantic annotation

Abstract

In online social networks (OSN), users quite usually disclose sensitive information about themselves by publishing messages. At the same time, they are (in many cases) unable to properly manage the access to this sensitive information due to the following issues: i) the rigidness of the access control mechanism implemented by the OSN, and ii) many users lack of technical knowledge about data privacy and access control. To tackle these limitations, in this paper, we propose a dynamic, transparent and privacy-driven access control mechanism for textual messages published in OSNs. The notion of privacy-driven is achieved by analyzing the semantics of the messages to be published and, according to that, assessing the degree of sensitiveness of their contents. For this purpose, the proposed system relies on an automatic semantic annotation mechanism that, by using knowledge bases and linguistic tools, is able to associate a meaning to the information to be published. By means of this annotation, our mechanism automatically detects the information that is sensitive according to the privacy requirements of the publisher of data, with regard to the type of reader that may access such data. Finally, our access control mechanism automatically creates sanitized versions of the users' publications according to the type of reader that accesses them. As a result, our proposal, which can be integrated in already existing social networks, provides an automatic, seamless and content-driven protection of user publications, which are coherent with her privacy requirements and the type of readers that access them. Complementary to the system design, we also discuss the feasibility of the system by illustrating it through a real example and evaluate its accuracy and effectiveness over standard approaches.

Research on Access Control in Cloud Storage System: From Single to Multi-Clouds

“…Tsai et al [17] built a cloud access control model by using roles ontology based RBAC model, and proposed an ontology transfer algorithm for similarity calculating in different ontology. Imran-Daud et al [56] used semantic network technology and raised a dynamic and privacy-driven access control model. By using knowledge base and language tools to replace the pre-defined sensitive words set, they propose an automatically method to assess the degree of sensitiveness.…”

Privacy-preserving data outsourcing in the cloud via semantic data splitting

“…However, in our setting, documents are generated independently by each user and, thus, they should be protected individually according to the semantics they disclose; free text is also unstructured and unbounded. Moreover, we would like the instantiation of the privacy model to be intuitive enough so that it can be employed by users to clearly define their privacy requirements; at this respect, most privacy models are instantiated by means of abstract numerical values [21,28,30], which many users find difficult to understand [31,32]. Finally, we would also like to seamlessly support protection against identity and/or attribute disclosure.…”

HAC: Hybrid Access Control for Online Social Networks

“…Anwar and Fong [22] designed a visualization tool to show the result of policy configurations. In [23], the authors presented an access control mechanism to protect textual contents in online social networks which is enforced to be transparent to content publishers and readers. The proposed system leveraged automatic semantic annotation to analyze the semantics of the contents in order to generate different versions according to types of readers.…”