Developing Application Programming Interface (API) Generator for Role-Based Access Control System in Social Networks

Abstract

With the huge expansion of social networks, they become an important part of users’ daily life everywhere, where users have large amount of data stored in these networks. these networks provide users with the tools and settings to control their privacy and security. Even though these settings give the users control over how to manage access to their data, they remain according to the specifications of the network providers rather than the user himself/herself. Role-based Access Control (RBAC) is a method used widely in managing user authorizations and restrictions in computer systems. This thesis research presents a new system called Etqan. Etqan is an API generator, that can create a fully RESTful API for any system with a granular full access control subsystem. Etqan will allow the users to easily generate APIs to access their own data and they can build the access control within these APIs. This research presents the design and develop the Etqan system and also validates, assesses, and tests the performance of the system. As a result, the Etqan system enables the users to act as super admins over their own data, where the actual network provider has no control over the users’ data, this will improve user privacy and security as the users are the only person who can grant access to any other user to access the data.