Enhanced sharing and privacy in distributed information sharing environments

Abstract

With the advancement in distributed computing and collaborative software technologies, information sharing and privacy related issues are gaining interest of researchers related to digital information creation, management, and distribution. Collaborative information sharing environment requires enhanced information sharing among users while privacy laws demand for the protection of user's information from unauthorized access and usage. Keeping this trade-off in view, there is a need for a flexible and enhanced information sharing model that preserves the privacy of user's information. We extend the Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model to incorporate sharing and privacy related requirements and present a Dynamic Sharing and Privacy-aware Role-Based Access Control (DySP-RBAC) model. It is a family of models including core, hierarchical, and constrained RBAC models. The RBAC model is extended using team and task data elements as well as new data elements related to sharing and privacy of information. Sharing and privacy-based permission assignments and their conflict-handling strategies are described for a distributed and dynamic information sharing scenario.