In "Grids" and "collaboratories," we find distributed communities of resource providers and resource consumers, within which often complex and dynamic policies govern who can use which resources for which purpose. We propose a new approach to the representation, maintenance, and enforcement of such policies that provides a scalable mechanism for specifying and enforcing these policies. Our approach allows resource providers to delegate some of the authority for maintaining fine-grained access control policies to communities, while still maintaining ultimate control over their resources. We also describe a prototype implementation of this approach and an application in a data management context.

References, listed in Section 8, are sorted into normative and information references. Normative references, listed in Section 8.1, are in the form [nXX]. Informative references, listed in Section 8.2, are in the form [iXX]. Section contains acknowledgements. Following Section 9, contains the Appendix, the contact information for the authors, the intellectual property information, and the copyright information for this document.

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Abstract