An Autonomic Trust Management Framework for Secure Dynamic Coalition Cooperation

Sharing resources and information in a secure fashion is a requirement for collaboration among distributed organizations. Proper access control mechanisms are required in order to manage access to those shared resources. A coalition provides a virtual space for collaborators to share their resources and interact with each other. To participate to a coalition, organizations must ensure that their resources are safe from inappropriate access while sharing specific resources with coalition participants. This paper presents a secure coalition framework based on a logic-based language, Subterfuge Safe Authorization Language (SSAL). In addition to the current rules in SSAL, we add two extra rules to provide the global unique interpretation for the permissions defined in the local policy of each coalition participant for accessing their resources. Our particular interest is introducing a distributed dynamic coalition framework that guarantees subterfuge freedom in cross coalition delegation of permissions. This allows to openly cooperate and share resources in a more secure manner.