Using Semantics for Dynamic Access Control of XML Documents in Dynamic Coalition Environment

In a dynamic coalition environment, organizations should be able to exercise their own local fine-grained access control policies while sharing resources with external entities. At the same time, the status of XML as a standard for storing and exchanging data in Internet and XML documents is becoming a de facto standard for storing and exchanging information. So, access control of XML documents is a key in dynamic coalition environment. In this paper, we propose an approach that exploits the semantics associated with subject and information in XML documents to facilitate automatic access control policies while resource sharing occurs among coalition members. Our approach relies on identifying the necessary attributes required by users to gain access to specific XML documents information. Specifically, it consists of extracting user attribute sets that semantically mach with the attributes of the information in XML documents. This relies on a closer examination of why a user is assigned a specific role.

1 Introduce

Today, there is an increasing need for dynamic, efficient and secure sharing of resources among organizations. This is driven by a number of applications including emergency and disaster management, peace keeping, humanitarian operations, or simply virtual enterprises for commercial purposes. Typically, resource sharing is done by establishing alliances and collaborations, also known as coalitions. Due to the nature of the applications, the coalitions are often dynamic where entities may join or leave the coalition in an ad-hoc manner.