Abstract-Recent years have seen an increasing number of collaborative systems and platforms available online. As the importance of online collaboration grows, so does the need to protect the information used in these systems. In collaborative environments different users may be related to the information in different capacities. This means that traditional access control mechanisms are usually not suitable for collaborative environments as they assume that a single entity is in control of information. Moreover, when different entities can concurrently specify policies for the same resources, the decision making process is not transparent to the users who expect their policies to be enforced by the system. In this paper, we introduce a novel access control framework for collaborative systems. The framework is based on a notion of control which goes beyond the notion of ownership by accounting for the relation of a user with an object. We also make access control decisions transparent by showing where and why collaborative decisions deviate from the policies of single users.

As social networks, shared editing platforms and other collaborative systems are becoming increasingly popular, the demands for proper protection of the data created and used within these systems grows. Yet, existing access control mechanisms are not suited for the challenges imposed by collaborative systems. Two main challenges should be addressed: collaborative specification of permissions, while ensuring an appropriate levels of control to the different parties involved, and enabling transparency in decision making in cases where the access requirements of these different parties are in conflict. In this paper we propose a data governance model for collaborative systems, which allows the integration of access requirements specified by different users based on their relation with a data object. We also study the practical feasibility of enabling transparency by comparing different deployment options for transparency in XACML.

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Citation:Kaluvuri SP, Egner AI, den Hartog J and Zannone N (2015)

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