A User-Activity-Centric Framework for Access Control in Online Social Networks

Today's ever-evolving online social networks (OSNs) need an effective and usable access control framework. OSN users typically have discretionary control over their content, relationships, and interactions, while the OSN's policies consolidate these individual choices into specific access and filtering decisions. OSN access control can be built around the concept of user activity. To this end, the authors distinguish usage activity from control activity and identify four core control activities: attribute, policy, relationship, and session. Their user-activity-centric framework enables future extensions as needed.