Affiliations: [a] Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA. E-mail: gahn@asu.edu | [b] Deutsche Bank Global Technologies, Frankfurt, Germany. E-mail: jjin@uncc.edu | [c] University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA. E-mail: mshehab@uncc.edu
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author: Gail-Joon Ahn, Arizona State University, 699 S. Mill Ave., Tempe, AZ, USA. E-mail: gahn@asu.edu.
Abstract: Ad-hoc collaboration is a newly emerged environment enabling distributed collaborators to share resources. The dynamic nature and unique sharing pattern in ad-hoc collaboration poses great challenges for security services to accommodate both access control and trust management requirements in providing controlled resource sharing. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive, integrated and implemented access management framework, called RAMARS, for secure digital information sharing in ad-hoc collaboration. Our framework incorporates a role-based approach to leverage the originator control, delegation and dissemination control. A trust awareness feature is integrated for dynamic user-role assignment based on user attributes. The access control polices are formally specified, and a peer-to-peer scientific information sharing system – ShareEnabler – is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach. The performance evaluation of our prototype system with potential system improvements is also discussed.
