Secure collaboration in mediator-free environments

Abstract

The internet and related technologies have made multidomain collaborations a reality. Collaboration enables domains to effectively share resources; however it introduces several security and privacy challenges. Managing security in the absence of a central mediator is even more challenging. In this paper, we propose a distributed secure interoperability framework for mediator-free collaboration environments. We introduce the idea of secure access paths which enables domains to make localized access control decisions without having global view of the collaboration. We also present a path authentication technique for proving path authenticity. Furthermore, we present both a proactive and on-demand path discovery algorithms that enable domains to securely discover paths in the collaboration environment.

Towards efficient collaboration in cyber security

“…The problem considered by the authors in [6] is then to compute the largest possible collaboration between a collection of systems which still remains secure, and the authors show that this problem is in fact NP-complete, thus showing that it is impractical to compute this largest set for a large array of distributed systems. Shehab, Bertino, and Ghafoor [18] expand on a variant of this model; their work presents a framework similar to that modeled by Gong and Qian, [6] [7], but in the absence of any trusted third-party mediator having a global view of access control policies and thus avoiding associated bottleneck issues associated with such a mediator.…”

An interaction-based access control model (IBAC) for collaborative services

“…Shehab [14] introduces the secure access path, which represents the access history of a user. He assumes multiple security domains and cross-domain rolemappings between the domains: a role in one domain can have the privileges of another role in the mapped domain.…”

“…Since the collaboration engine has a global view of the graph, a context includes both preceding and succeeding interactions affecting a service. This allows the service to make access decisions based not only on the past access history (as in Chinese Wall [4] and Shehab's work [14]), but also on future accesses --i.e., interactions with downstream services.…”

Flexible Authorization with Decentralized Access Control Model for Grid Computing

“…A framework for secure collaboration between domains is proposed in [24], where each domain uses RBAC and policies are locally enforced by individual domains in a mediator-free manner. Our approach also leverages the management flexibility of RBAC but with an extended model enhanced with group concept.…”