Security Maintenance Mediation: a technology for preventing unintended security breaches

Abstract

SUMMARYWeb-resident information is becoming 'smarter', in the sense that emerging technology will support the annotation of it with ontological terms, which will be used to locate and reuse information. This will pose a great security risk in the form of unintended breaches (as distinct from deliberate invasions). Web-resident information will be far more readily available and relevant, thus causing inadvertent releases of secure information to potentially cause it to be diffusely spread across the Internet. Then as this information is iteratively transformed and integrated with other information, it will become irretrievable and potentially used in a myriad of unpredictable ways. The problem is that ontological annotations, while making information more understandable in its original form, do not provide a means for easily capturing the complex semantics of information that has been transformed via abstraction, aggregation, and integration. This demands the development of a semantically rich way of specifying 'views' of Web information, to which security controls can be attached. Also needed is a way for users of secure information to easily and voluntarily blend-and thereby propagate-security controls as information is transformed. Information mediators designed by collaborative teams of experts are proposed as the vehicle for wrapping information, so that at each step of reuse, high-level views and their corresponding integrity controls can be made easily accessible to trusted users who will then be able to ensure their proper maintenance.

XℓPPX: A Lightweight Framework for Privacy Preserving P2P XML Databases in Very Large Publish-Subscribe Systems

“…Goals of [2] are different from ours, as [2] aims at providing a sort of "application-level" degree of security which could indeed used on top of our framework to exploit the available functionalities in the context of (secure) P2P Web Services. Security on semantic views of Web information are realized by means of information mediators in [16]. This architecture, although very interesting for a Web context, is not applicable to a P2P network.…”