A Framework of Rights Allocation in 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 evolve with the applications. The rise of online social networks (OSN) like Facebook has posed new social requirements over the privacy of users' data. This is partially due to the social structure of users and partially due to the complexity of OSN having millions of users interacting with each other. Currently, there are some access control models for OSN but they lack a systematical scheme to allocate and re-allocate rights over social objects and entities. This paper presents a rights allocation framework based on the characteristics of rights allocation in OSN and provides a reduction tree to design the model based on these properties. The proposed framework extends the availability of rights and can be used as a basis for different rights allocation models in online social networks.