Coordinating Data Usage Control in Loosely-Connected Networks

Abstract

In a disaster-recovery mission, rescuers need to coordinate their operations and exchange information to make the right judgments and perform their statutory duties. The information exchanged may be privileged or sensitive and not generally in the public domain. For instance, the assessment of the risk level in the disaster area where a chemical plant is located requires data about the nature of the potential chemical hazards and the probability of an hazardous event to occur. Such data may contain information that could be of value to a rival company and may generate chaos if released to the public. Retaining control of data that is shared between organisations can be achieved by deploying Enterprise Rights Management (ERM) systems. However, ERM systems rely on centralised authorities that must be contacted by client applications to obtain access rights. Such centralised solutions are not practical in a disaster scenario where communication infrastructure may have been damaged by the event making very difficult to establish reliable wide-are communications. In this paper, we propose a solution for the enforcement of usage control policies that leverage on the data dissemination model of Opportunistic Networks (oppnets). Our solution, named xDUCON, relies on the data abstraction of the Shared Data Space (SDS). Data and usage control policies are represented as tuples that are disseminated across the available SDSs connected through the oppnets.