Access control in Group Communication Systems

With advances in distributed computing technologies, group communication systems (GCS) have received a lot of attentions. Besides reliable and ordered message delivery services, these applications require plenty of security services, such as data secrecy, data integrity, and user authentication. However, less work has been invested on how to integrate authorization scheme within efficient communication systems, especially for group collaborations. In this paper, we present a flexible and efficient authorization scheme which provides group-level fine-grained access control and can be easily integrated to existing GCS. More specifically, we propose the concept of virtual group (VG) and automatic access control policy generation mechanism to realize secure collaborations between different groups. We implement a prototype with Spread and our experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of our authorization scheme.