SAMPAC: Socially-Aware collaborative Multi-Party Access Control

According to the current design of content sharing services, such as Online Social Networks (OSNs), typically (i) the service provider has unrestricted access to the uploaded resources and (ii) only the user uploading the resource is allowed to define access control permissions over it. This results in a lack of control from other users that are associated, in some way, with that resource. To cope with these issues, in this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving system that allows users to upload their resources encrypted, and we design a collaborative multi-party access control model allowing all the users related to a resource to participate in the specification of the access control policy. Our model employs a threshold-based secret sharing scheme, and by exploiting users' social relationships, sets the trusted friends of the associated users responsible to partially enforce the collective policy. Through replication of the secret shares and delegation of the access control enforcement role, our model ensures that resources are timely available when requested. Finally, our experiments demonstrate that the performance overhead of our model is minimal and that it does not signi ficantly affect user experience.