Service independent access control architecture for user generated content (UGC) and its implementation

Using Web-based content management systems such as Blog, an end user can easily publish User Generated Content (UGC). Although publishing of UGCs is easy, controlling access to them is a difficult problem for end users. Currently, most of Blog sites offer no access control mechanism, and even when it is available to users, it is not sufficient to control users who do not have an account at the site, not to mention that it cannot control accesses to content hosted by other UGC sites. In this paper, we propose new access control architecture for UGC, in which third party entities can offer access control mechanism to users independently of UGC hosting sites. With this architecture, a user can control accesses to his content that might be spread over many different UGC sites, regardless of whether those sites have access control mechanism or not. The key idea to separate access control mechanism from UGC sites is to apply cryptographic access control and we implemented the idea in such a way that it requires no modification to UGC sites and Web browsers. Our prototype implementation shows that the proposed access control architecture can be easily deployed in the current Web-based communication environment and it works quite well with popular Blog sites.