Trust-Based Usage Control in Collaborative Environment

Most access control models have formal access control rules to govern the authorization of a request from a principal. In pervasive and collaborative environments, the behaviors of a principal are uncertain due to partial information. Moreover, the attributes of a principal, requested objects, and contexts of a request are mutable during the collaboration. A variety of such uncertainty and mutability pose challenges when resources sharing must happen in the collaborative environment. In order to address the above challenges, we propose a framework to integrate trust management into a usage control model in order to support decision making in an ever-changing collaborative environment. First, a trust value of a principal is evaluated based on both observed behaviors and peer recommendations. Second, the usage-based access control rules are checked to make decisions on resource exchanges. Our framework handles uncertainty and mutability by dynamically disenrolling untrusted principals and revoking granted on-going access if access control rules are no longer met. We have applied our trust-based usage control framework to an application of file sharing.

A Proposition for Developing Trust and Relational Synergy in International e-Collaborative Groups

Trust and relational development represents a critical challenge in online collaboration groups. Often the problem is attributed to several factors including physical distances, time differences, cultures, and other contributing factors. The challenge in virtual teams centers on creating a successful cohort that functions as a team and develops a sense of trust and cohesion in the process of accomplishing respective group goals. However, the lack of trust in online groups hinders relational development. The author contends that while online collaboration can be clouded by problems with trust and relational synergy as a whole, the problem is exacerbated in international online or e-Collaborative groups. The development of trust is essential to relational synergy and warmth that fosters successful task and social goal accomplishment. After reviewing related and extant research in online communication, the author offers some practical suggestions for facilitating and sustaining trust and relational synergy in international online collaboration with information communication technologies (ICTs).

Securing Mobile-Agent Systems through Collaboration

Mobile agents are self-contained programs that migrate among computing devices to achieve tasks on behalf of users. Autonomous and mobile agents make it easier to develop complex distributed systems. Many applications can benefit greatly from employing mobile agents, especially e-commerce. For instance, mobile agents can travel from one e-shop to another, collecting offers based on customers’ preferences. Mobile agents have been used to develop systems for telecommunication networks, monitoring, information retrieval, and parallel computing. Characteristics of mobile agents, however, introduce new security issues which require carefully designed solutions. On the one hand, malicious agents may violate privacy, attack integrity, and monopolize hosts’ resources. On the other hand, malicious hosts may manipulate agents’ memory, return wrong results from system calls, and deny access to necessary resources. This has motivated research focused on devising techniques to address the security of mobile-agent systems. This chapter surveys the techniques securing mobile-agent systems. The survey categorizes the techniques based on the degree of collaboration used to achieve security. This categorization resembles the difference between this chapter and other surveys in the literature where categorization is on the basis of entities/ parts protected and underlying methodologies used for protection. This survey shows the importance of collaboration in enhancing security and discusses its implications and challenges.

Data Protection in Collaborative Business Applications

Collaborative business applications are an active field of research and an emerging practice in industry. This chapter will focus on data protection in b2b applications which offer a wide range of business models and architecture, since often equal partners are involved in the transactions. It will present three distinct applications, their business models, security requirements and the newest solutions for solving these problems. The three applications are collaborative benchmarking, fraud detection and supply chain management. Many of these applications will not be realized if no appropriate measure for protecting the collaborating parties’ data are taken. This chapter focuses on the strongest form of data protection. The business secrets are kept entirely secret from other parties (or at least to the degree possible). This also corresponds to the strongest form of privacy protection in many instances. The private information does not leave the producing system, (i.e., data protection), such that the information producer remains its sole owner. In case of B2B application, the sensitive data are usually business secrets, and not personally identifiable data as in privacy protection.

How Trust and Reputation-Based Collaboration Impact Wireless Sensor Network Security

Like wired network security, wireless sensor network (WSN) security encompasses the typical network security requirements which are: confidentiality, integrity, authentication, non-repudiation and availability. At the same time, security for WSNs differs from traditional security designed for classical wired networks in many points because of the new constraints imposed by WSN technology. Many aspects are due to the limited resources (memory space, CPU …) and infrastructure-less property of WSNs. Therefore traditional security mechanisms cannot be applied directly and WSNs are more prone to existing and new threats than traditional networks. Typical threats are the physical capture of sensor nodes, the service disruption due to the unreliable wireless communication. Parameters specific to WSN characteristics may help to reduce the effect of threats. Examples of existing measures are efficient WSN power management strategies that can dynamically adjust the node cycles (sleeping or awake mode) based on the current network workload or the use of redundant information to locally detect lying nodes. In addition to adjusting existing WSN characteristics that impact security, establishing trust and collaboration is essential in WSNs for many reasons such as the high distribution of sensor nodes or the goal-oriented nature of many sensing applications. This chapter emphasizes the need of collaboration between sensor nodes and shows that establishing trust between nodes and using reputation reported by collaborating nodes can help mitigate security issues.

Teamworking for Security

Collaborative methods are promising tools for solving complex security tasks. In this context, the authors present the security overlay framework CIMD (Collaborative Intrusion and Malware Detection), enabling participants to state objectives and interests for joint intrusion detection and find groups for the exchange of security-related data such as monitoring or detection results accordingly; to these groups the authors refer as detection groups. First, the authors present and discuss a tree-oriented taxonomy for the representation of nodes within the collaboration model. Second, they introduce and evaluate an algorithm for the formation of detection groups. After conducting a vulnerability analysis of the system, the authors demonstrate the validity of CIMD by examining two different scenarios inspired sociology where the collaboration is advantageous compared to the non-collaborative approach. They evaluate the benefit of CIMD by simulation in a novel packet-level simulation environment called NeSSi (Network Security Simulator) and give a probabilistic analysis for the scenarios.

Challenges in Sharing Computer and Network Logs

It is desirable for many reasons to share information, particularly computer and network logs. Researchers need it for experiments, incident responders need it for collaborative security, and educators need this data for real world examples. However, the sensitive nature of this information often prevents its sharing. Anonymization techniques have been developed in recent years that help reduce risk and navigate the trade-offs between privacy, security and the need to openly share information. This chapter looks at the progress made in this area of research over the past several years, identifies the major problems left to solve and sets a roadmap for future research.