Secure Collaboration in a Mediator-Free Distributed Environment

The internet and related technologies have made multidomain collaborations a reality. Collaboration enables domains to effectively share resources; however, it introduces several security and privacy challenges. Managing security in the absence of a central mediator is even more challenging. In this paper, we propose a distributed secure interoperability framework for mediator-free collaboration environments. We introduce the idea of secure access paths, which enables domains to make localized access control decisions without having global view of the collaboration. We also present a path authentication technique for proving path authenticity. Furthermore, we present an on-demand path discovery algorithms that enable domains to securely discover paths in the collaboration environment. We implemented a simulation of our proposed framework and ran experiments to investigate the effect of several design parameters on our proposed access path discovery algorithm.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TPDS
• Authors: Mohamed Shehab, Arif Ghafoor, Elisa Bertino
• Keywords: Access Path, Collaboration Environment, Path Discovery, TPDS 2008