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

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, this paper proposes a taxonomy-based approach to describe and model the complex security space characterizing OSNs. The contributions of the paper are: i) to introduce a systematic approach to understand and describe the “problem space” of an OSN and ii) to showcase basic models for better organizing the engineering and the research to be done.