Mobi-CoSWAC: An access control approach for collaborative scientific workflow in mobile environment

Abstract

With the development of mobile technology and popularity of pervasive applications, more and more scientific collaborative research works are carried out in the wild or on the move. How to make an optimal tradeoff between deep collaboration and strict access control in mobile environments is a challenging work. In this paper, we propose Mobi-CoSWAC, an access control approach for collaborative scientific workflow in mobile environments. In our approach, ranked access permissions will be provided to users for continuous collaboration in disconnected settings, as well as the owned access permissions can be dynamically assigned according to the role's evolution in various mobile contexts. The model and access control algorithms of Mobi-CoSWAC are elaborated and a prototype is implemented on Android mobile devices in collaborative proteomics research platform CoPExplorer to demonstrate its effectiveness. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.