Abstract:

This project aims to explore access control techniques for dynamically created groups. The starting point will be the Yioop, a PHP-based search engine. The ability to create social groups will be added to Yioop. We have explored different policies for automatically adding access levels and compared them with the policies of existing social networks to gain an insight into how access control is provided. Last semester we implemented a Manage Groups feature to Yioop and a feature to group the users. This semester a Grouping feature in Yioop will be improved by adding the additional functionalities like, building pages and blogs for every group and adding an option to mark a group public or not. Detailed experiments to compare the access control methods of existing social networking sites with the access control methods in Yioop will be conducted.

CS297 Results:

• Studied the proposal, design, implementations, and the results from B.Ur and R.McGrath paper Grouping Friends for Access Control in Online Social Network.
• Conducted experiments on different social networking websites that explore access control to different groups and also different users within a group. Also compared the accessibility of using a Group feature between different web applications and social networking sites such as Skype, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo.
• Added a Manage Groups feature in Yioop and implemented the feature to group the users.
• Enhanced the Manage Groups feature by implementing the View Groups feature.

Proposed Schedule

Key Deliverables:

• Software
  • Deliver a patch for implementing the Manage Groups feature in Yioop.
  • Building web pages and blogs for every group in Yioop.
  • Providing access control techniques to the Groups in Yioop by marking a group public or not.
  • Comparing the access control methods of the existing social networking sites with the access control methods in Yioop.
• Report
  • CS298 Report.
  • Project Code and Test results Documentation.

Innovations and Challenges:

• Conducting and analyzing the experiments on different social networking websites that explore access control to different groups and also different users within a group was challenging and time consuming as several activities were to be considered.
• Comparing the accessibility of using a Create Group feature between different web applications and social networking sites gave an insight of how access control is given.
• Adding a Manage Groups feature in Yioop and implementing the feature to group the users is innovative and challenging as this feature will add the ability to create social groups to Yioop.
• Implementing activities like changing the group privacy options and transferring the admin property to a different user within a group will be interesting and challenging to accomplish.

References:

[1] Information Retrieval: Implementing and Evaluating Search Engines. Stefan, Clarke, Charles, and Cormack, Gordon. The MIT Press. 2010.

[2] Abdessalem.T, and Dhia.B.I (January 29,2013). Reachability based Access Control Model for Online Social Networks (www page). URL. http://isicil.inria.fr/v2/res/docs/articles/DBSocial2011/DBsocial__paper.pdf

[3] Jahid.S, Mittal.P, and Borisov.N (2011). EASiER: Encryption-based Access Control in Social Networks with Efficient Revocation (www page). URL. Retrieved January 30, 2013. http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~sjahid2/pub/easier-asiaccs2011.pdf