Distributed cooperative updates of XML documents

Abstract

Securing web documents entails addressing two key issues: privacy and integrity. Whereas the problem of privacy has been widely investigated, the problem of how to ensure that a document, when moving among different parties, is modified only according to the stated policies still lack comprehensive solutions. In this paper we present a solution to this problem by proposing a model for specifying authoring policies, and an infrastructure supporting the specification and enforcement of these policies in a distributed and cooperative environment. The key aspect of our proposal is that, by using a combination of hash functions and digital signature techniques, a subject is able to verify, upon receiving a document, whether the update operations performed on the document till that point are correct with respect to the authoring policies, without interacting with the document server. © 2003 by Springer Science+Business Media New York.