Contextualizing security for digital long-term preservation

Abstract

Nowadays a growing amount of information not only exists in digital form but was actually born-digital. Digital long-term preservation becomes continuously important and is tackled by several international and national projects like the US National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program or the EU FP7 SHAMAN Integrated Project. The very essence of long-term preservation is the preserved data, which in turn requires an appropriate security model, which is so far often neglected in the preservation community. To address this problem, we extend the security relevant parts of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) standard by a concept for hierarchical security policy development based on given use-cases for a long-term archival system. The corresponding policies are then distributed and implemented by applying an iterative procedure to turn them to rules, and then the rules are enforced. In this paper we describe how to construct a corresponding context model and derive such policies using an iterative approach to assure the system and data security.