Title: A taxonomy-based model of security and privacy in online social networks

Authors: L. Caviglione; M. Coccoli; A. Merlo

Addresses: Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation (ISSIA) – Genoa Branch, National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Via De Marini, 6 – I-16149, Genova, Italy ' Department of Communications, Computer and Systems Science, University of Genoa, Via Opera Pia, 13 – I-16145, Genova, Italy ' Department of Communications, Computer and Systems Science, University of Genoa, Via Opera Pia, 13 – I-16145, Genova, Italy; e-Campus University, Via Isimbardi, 10 – I-22060, Novedrate, Como, Italy

Abstract: Social environments were already present in the original web vision, but nowadays are mainly available through online social networks (OSNs), which are a real cultural phenomenon. However, their actual deployment is very heterogeneous, reflecting into different development choices and functional architectures. Such aspects, jointly with the intrinsic sharing of personal information, lead to severe risks both in terms of security and privacy. In this perspective, our work proposes a taxonomy-based approach to describe and model the complex security space characterising OSNs. The contributions of this paper are: 1) to introduce a systematic approach to define the 'problem space' of an OSN; 2) to showcase basic models for organising the engineering and the needed checking procedures.

Keywords: security; privacy; online social networks; OSNs; taxonomy; modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2014.060717

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2014 Vol.9 No.4, pp.325 - 338

Received: 16 Feb 2012
Accepted: 23 Apr 2012

Published online: 24 May 2014 *

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