Location-based Access Control in Neighborhood Geosocial Network: a Case of Emergency Assistance

To enforce safer virtual neighborhood environment, access control is essential to specify privileges or access rights to resources in neighborhood geosocial network applications. In the case of emergency circumstances, several concerns in implementing access control have been identified: (1) inefficient message sending to irrelevant recipients (2) location spoofing (3) gossip and rumors due to disclosing information to wrong audience. To address such potential risks, access control specifically tailored for neighborhood geosocial network is required. The objective of this paper is two-fold: First, to propose an access control using density-based and position-based location conditions for neighborhood geosocial network. Second, to design mySOS, a proof-of-concept prototype that incorporate the proposed access control to improve access control for emergency assistance in neighborhood geosocial network. To achieve the objectives, a combination of proposed self-organized segmentation algorithms (density-based) and resident engagement incentives (position-based) are implemented. This study contributes to a new way for access control that will determine user profile in accessing emergency assistance features in a neighborhood geosocial network application.