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, 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. © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.