Towards a secure and borderless collaboration between organizations: An automated enforcement mechanism

Abstract

During the last decade, organizations have been more and more aware of the benefits of engaging in collaborative activities. To attain a required collaborative objective, they are obligated to share sensitive resources such as data, services, and knowledge. However, sharing sensitive and private resources and exposing them for an external usage may prevent the organizations involved from collaborating. Therefore, this usage requires more preoccupation with security issues. Access control is one of these required security concerns. Several access control models are defined in the literature and this multitude of models creates heterogeneity of access control policies between the collaborating organizations. In this paper, we propose Access Control in Cross-Organizational coLLABoration ACCOLLAB, a solution for automatic mapping between heterogeneous access control policies in cross-organizational collaboration. To carry out this mapping, we suggest a mechanism founded mainly on XACML profiles and on a generic language derivative of XACML we define as Generic-XACML. We also formally prove that the mapping does not affect decision evaluation of policies. Thereby the proposed contribution ACCOLLAB allows each collaborating organization to communicate their access control policies and adopt other's policies without affecting their existing access control systems.