Managing uncertainty in access control decisions in distributed autonomous collaborative environments

Abstract

Coalitions of autonomous domains gain constantly interest during the last years due to the various fields of their potential application. A lot of challenges of both academic as well as of practical nature are related with their deployment. Among else, the distributed nature of a coalition demands special focus in respect to security management. In this paper we argue about the necessity for adjustable security mechanisms towards the security management of multi-domain environments; we describe an approach that allows determination of preferences when defining access control permissions over the shared objects. We handle such preferences by encoding access control constraints using fuzzy relations and we describe a prototype security architecture that implements the basic principles of our approach. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.