Dynamic policy adaptation for collaborative groups

Abstract

Dynamic collaborative peer groups generally have constantly changing application requirements and varied security requirements, and require a secure and reliable group communication. Self-organizing groups like f/oss motivate the need for dynamic multi-level access control. Currently there are some integrated solutions for secure group communication, but very few allow dynamic multi-level access control based on trust. We propose a framework for collaborative groups which integrates authentication, admission control, policy based access control, adaptive trust and key management. Our model permits peers to regulate their own behavior by deploying access control policies dynamically based on the behavior and trust level of peers in the group and the current group composition. Peers can collaboratively modify policies governing their level. Our trust metric is a tunable metric based on context specific attributes. Functionality of members in a group is also dynamic and the group can dynamically prioritise requests for join. We tested the behavior of groups under different application scenario by implementing our framework in overlay simulator peersim integrated with Prolog. Our experiments show that dynamic polices based on the adaptive trust and changing group composition lead to better group efficiency as compared to static access control policies. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.