Virtual enterprise access control requirements

Abstract

Current developments in IT point towards the formation of loosely coupled enterprises, often referred to as virtual enterprises. These enterprises require both secure and flexible collaboration between unrelated information systems. Web services technology can be used as an ideal platform for realising virtual enterprises throughh their ease of integration, flexibility, and support of XML vocabularies. To ensure the successful implementation of Web services within virtual enterprises, new approaches to security are required. Together with authentication, access control has been seen as a pillar of IT security approaches. The focus of this paper will be to determine requirements that could play a role when the access control policies of such enterprises are defined.