Security policy integration and conflict reconciliation for collaborations among organizations in ubiquitous computing environments

Abstract

The investigative capabilities and productivity of researchers and practitioners of various organizations can be greatly expanded with collaborations among these organizations in ubiquitous computing environments. However, in order to provide effective collaborations among organizations in ubiquitous computing environments, due to the heterogeneity and dynamic nature of the ubiquitous computing environments it is critical to generate an integrated security policy set to govern the interactions among collaborating organizations during the collaboration. Existing approaches in security policy integration and conflict analysis have focused on static policy analysis which cannot address the dynamic formation of collaborative groups in ubiquitous computing environments. In this paper, an approach is presented to security policy integration, including a similarity-based policy adaptation algorithm for changing collaborative groups and a negotiation-based policy generation protocol for the new resources generated by the collaboration as well as for conflict reconciliation. Our approach can be automated with user defined control variables, which can greatly improve the efficiency and make the system scalable with little human intervention. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.