Delegating revocations and authorizations in collaborative business environments

Abstract

Efficient collaboration allows organizations and individuals to improve the efficiency and quality of their business activities. Delegations, as a signif icant approach, may occur as workflow collabora tions, supply chain collaborations, or collaborative commerce. Role-based delegation models have been used as flexible and efficient access management for collaborative business environments. Delegation revocations can provide significant functionalities for the models in business environments when the delegated roles or permissions are required to get back. However, problems may arise in the revocation process when one user delegates user U a role and another user delegates U a negative authorization of the role. This paper aims to analyse various role-based delegation revocation features through examples. Revocations are categorized in four dimensions: Dependency, Resilience, Propagation and Dominance. According to these dimensions, sixteen types of revocations exist for specific requests in collaborative business environments: DependentWeakLocalDelete, Dependent WeakLocalNegative, DependentWeakGlobalDelete, DependentWeakGlobalNegative, IndependentWeak LocalDelete, IndependentWeakLocalNegative, Inde pendentWeakGlobalDelete, IndependentWeakGlobal Negative, and so on. We present revocation delegating models, and then discuss user delegation authorization and the impact of revocation operations. Finally, comparisons with other related work are discussed.