Security Management for Flexibility in Virtual Knowledge Spaces

This paper attends to setting up a secure, flexible and high-performance authorization infrastructure for virtual knowledge spaces. The concept of virtual knowledge spaces is suitable cooperative work environments, that require high user and multiple user interaction. The WasabiBeans framework procures a set of functionalities, such as a persistency layer, event notification and central authentication through LDAP connection, that supports the implementation of cooperative applications. Since WasabiBeans claims to be a framework for various fields of applications, even those who require high data security have to be considered. On the one hand the presented authorization infrastructure guarantees data security, on the other hand it attempts to lower administrative effort in terms of configuring access rights. Many applications supporting cooperative work lack either in terms of flexibility and adaptability or the complexity of administrative work exceeds the users´ skills. Our approach introduces rights and permissions to set up the authorization infrastructure. Furthermore we respond to the advantages to WasabiBeans and explain the modifications in the frameworks´ implementation. Finally we show how the right management can operate with all the originalities and special cases resulting from the flexible and powerful concept of virtual knowledge spaces without having performance losings.