Access Control for Collaborative Systems: A Web Services Based Approach

Nowadays, systems are more and more open, distributed and collaborative. In this context, access control is an important issue that should be studied, specified and well enforced. This work proposes a new access control model for collaborative systems: "PolyOrBAC". On the one hand, we extend OrBAC (organization-based access control model) to specify local as well as collaboration access control rules; on the other hand, we enforce these security policies by applying Web services mechanisms (XML, SOAP, UDDI and WSDL). Then, we present a representative scenario of secure collaborative applications. Furthermore, we propose a XACML-based implementation of PolyOrBAC and we discuss the most important approaches that emphasize access control in collaborative environments.