Conflict resolution in heterogeneous co-allied MANET: A formal approach

Abstract

Implementing a conflict free access control policies for coallied networks where different organizations involve for a common goal is becoming important. In mission-critical scenarios, different organizational networks cooperate to form a single mobile ad hoc network to implement their respective operations. These teams (or quads) are operated under different set of local policies for their own security, which results heterogeneity in access control. Each team wants to preserve its access control policies at maximum level. Moreover, a set of allied policies governs the interaction among the different teams, which may conflict with their local policies. In mobile ad hoc networks this becomes more challenging due to absence of network perimeter and mobility. In addition, the policy rules may have local and transitive conflicts. To achieve successful completion of the mission, compromising with the stringency of the enforcement of the conflicting rules for the quads may be required. In this paper, we propose a formal method to find the optimal negotiation of the policy rules to preserve the mission. The efficacy of the work lies on optimizing the enforcement of access control policies to achieve the coalition instead of negating the policy. © 2014 Springer-Verlag.