A community based authentication and authorisation mechanism for digital ecosystem

In this paper, we present a distributed mechanism for elevating resource protection in a Digital Ecosystem environment. The dynamic interaction and collaboration between Digital Ecosystem entities poise several main challenges in protecting the resources and information. First, a strong mechanism is needed to ensure only the authentic entities that are able to access the resources. Second, this mechanism must also maintain the confidentiality and integrity of resources over the untrusted network. Unfortunately, the existing mechanisms which focus on providing a centralized protection facade several issues ranging from single point failure to huge administrative burden. Therefore, we present a distributed mechanism to address these challenges. The inclusivity of community based trust approach in our mechanism further promotes its applicability to the Digital Ecosystem environment, on which it is heavily driven by the interacting entities. Public Key Infrastructure is employed to provide a strong protection during its access workflow.