Unraveling decentralized authorization for multi-domain collaborations

Current authorization solutions take highly case-by-case approaches. First of all, the solutions address particular types of multi-domain collaborations such as virtual organization or resource-sharing collaborations. Secondly, they tend to be based on specific technology their subject interactions adopt. We consider this phenomena of having a number of different authorization solutions as a result of taking a mainly bottom-up approach to cater the authorization need of diverse types of mult-domain collaborations currently existing. In this paper, we present an extended analysis of different types of multi-domain collaborations based on various e-Government case studies as well as that of existing authorization solutions. With the converged requirements resulting from those analyses, we take a top-down approach of explicitly highlighting generic and interoperable components for a decentralized authorization scheme. This approach appears to be more suitable to produce a more efficient and elegant authorization solution for the majority of multi-domain collaborations.