Coalitional games for the management of anonymous access in online social networks

We propose a novel anonymous access control protocol which is formulated as a series of coalitional games, where the players are the owners of shared private resources (big volumes of data) in online social networks (OSNs). Basically, co-owners cooperate to generate by themselves an attribute-based boolean formula to control access to their shared resource. By means of this boolean formula, co-owners are able to secretly express their privacy preferences over a common shared resource and requesters can anonymously access the secured private resource. In this paper, we formally analyze our protocol's fairness from a cooperative game theory point of view, and how OSN users, which are mostly cooperative, evaluate their expected gains and costs to adopt such cooperative privacy management scheme in many different settings.