An analysis of the chinese wall pattern for guaranteeing confidentiality in grid-based virtual organisations

Virtual organisations (VO) allow independent organisations to share resources and collaborate to achieve common goals. When a VO is defined in a business context and confidential information is shared, security becomes a main concern. Furthermore, business contexts the VO need to adapt quickly to changes in the environment. Maintaining security in a dynamic environment is particularly challenging open issue in current Grids. The security issues are not only related to the protection from the outside world but also to the protection of the integrity and confidentiality of each organisation against potentially conflicting goals within the VO. To tackle this problem, this paper shows how the general Chinese wall security model can be adapted for use in Gridbased VO. The result is a reusable Chinese wall pattern that is expressed in terms of a VO ontology. The pattern formalization is also proved using the Alloy SAT-based technology. This work is a first step towards deploying Chinese walls in operational Grid-based VO.