Self Protecting Data Sharing Using Generic Policies

Although content sharing provides many benefits, content owners lose full control of their content once they are given away. Existing solutions provide limited capabilities of content access control as they are vendor-specific, non-structured and non-flexible. In this paper, we present an open and flexible software solution called SelfProtect Object (SPO). SPO bundles content and policy files in an object that can protect its contents by itself anywhere and anytime. Our policy is based on XACML, a generic policy language allowing fine-grain access with rules and conditions. We also design and implement a prototype of SPO and demonstrate its capability through examples. Our solution is flexible to express a variety of access control rules and open to integrate into different applications on different platforms.