Kevin Gallagher, Santiago Torres-Arias, N. Memon, J. Feldman
{"title":"COLBAC: Shifting Cybersecurity from Hierarchical to Horizontal Designs","authors":"Kevin Gallagher, Santiago Torres-Arias, N. Memon, J. Feldman","doi":"10.1145/3498891.3498903","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Cybersecurity suffers from an oversaturation of centralized, hierarchical systems and a lack of exploration in the area of horizontal security, or security techniques and technologies which utilize democratic participation for security decision-making. Because of this, many horizontally governed organizations such as activist groups, worker cooperatives, trade unions, not-for-profit associations, and others are not represented in current cybersecurity solutions, and are forced to adopt hierarchical solutions to cybersecurity problems. This causes power dynamic mismatches that lead to cybersecurity and organizational operations failures. In this work we introduce COLBAC, a collective based access control system aimed at addressing this lack. COLBAC uses democratically authorized capability tokens to express access control policies. It allows for a flexible and dynamic degree of horizontality to meet the needs of different horizontally governed organizations. After introducing COLBAC, we finish with a discussion on future work needed to realize more horizontal security techniques, tools, and technologies.","PeriodicalId":320273,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2021 New Security Paradigms Workshop","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2021-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings of the 2021 New Security Paradigms Workshop","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3498891.3498903","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
Cybersecurity suffers from an oversaturation of centralized, hierarchical systems and a lack of exploration in the area of horizontal security, or security techniques and technologies which utilize democratic participation for security decision-making. Because of this, many horizontally governed organizations such as activist groups, worker cooperatives, trade unions, not-for-profit associations, and others are not represented in current cybersecurity solutions, and are forced to adopt hierarchical solutions to cybersecurity problems. This causes power dynamic mismatches that lead to cybersecurity and organizational operations failures. In this work we introduce COLBAC, a collective based access control system aimed at addressing this lack. COLBAC uses democratically authorized capability tokens to express access control policies. It allows for a flexible and dynamic degree of horizontality to meet the needs of different horizontally governed organizations. After introducing COLBAC, we finish with a discussion on future work needed to realize more horizontal security techniques, tools, and technologies.