POLICY LANGUAGE FOR ACCESS CONTROL IN SOCIAL NETWORK CLOUD

Over the past several decades, the number of people using online social networks for public relations or sharing documents have increased significantly. This worldwide use of social networks has made them to be an excellent candidate for using cloud. As a result, numerous access control methods have been proposed to maximize available resources. In addition, to protect these resources, access control policies have been devised. This research provides a model to protect shared data from unauthorized access. This model enforces finer-grained access control in a social network, and enables users to define policies to govern belonging resources and to input inquiries in order to access a resource in the most effective way. Policies and inquiries are converted to an easy-to-use format, which enhances the time and efficiency of evaluation of inputs. In this paper, we propose a well-formed notation for specifying a cloud-based social network and the associated access control policies. We show that our notation enables users to define policies in a simpler and more efficient way and that it helps users to protect their assets under a tight security. The main contribution of this work is that resource owners are able to protect their resources from unauthorized access in an easy and efficient way, and requestors are able to feed their access requests in a simple, clear, and effortless way as well.