Handling Data Confidentiality Attack due to Data Sharing using Trust-based Approach in Online Social Networks

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are getting popular among all the people around the globe. With the growing popularity, achieving the data confidentiality from the user’s perspective is considered to be most important. Though data like photos or videos that are uploaded by the owner of the profile is visible to all the friends, it is not always that the user wants it to be viewed by all the friends in the friend list. To give only selected friends the access to the data, a trust based access control mechanism is proposed which will help achieve data confidentiality. The trust score is dependent on different parameters. The paper takes forward the concept of trust-based access control and also proposes the mechanism to handle the threat to data confidentiality due to sharing of the data by friends. Thus the paper solves the problem of data confidentiality attack in OSN due to sharing of the data. To the best of our knowledge this is the first paper that proposes the solution to the threat using trust between the user and friends that occurs due to dissemination of the data in OSN using trust-based approach. Index Terms —Trust, data confidentiality, Online Social Networks, trust-based access control, threat handling