Enhancing the Security and Usability of Dui Based Collaboration with Proof Based Access Control

Abstract

Managing access control (AC) of shared resources is at the heart of any collaboration platform. Thereby, the usability of used AC techniques is crucial for projects with high expectations to fast response times within targeted collaboration processes. In this paper, we address the special case of using the anonymous credential system idemix in a project dealing with distributed user interfaces (DUIs) to enhance decision making in disaster situations. We show the potential of using idemix to enhance the usability of decision making in crisis situations by using DUIs while considering security and privacy. We present this exemplary by means of a developed prototypic collaborative environment, composed by a WallShare based server-side and mobile application for supporting collaborative scenarios within the ReSCUeIT project. Since DUI based collaboration demands wide-support of multiple devices, especially mobile ones, we further present IdeREST, a REST-full idemix integration and idemiX++, the first C++ based implementation of idemix worldwide, to the best of our knowledge. With both we show how to overcome the current gap related to the simultaneous support on non-Java devices such as Windows Phone 7/8 along with performance improvements on Android based platforms when using idemix as an exemplary anonymous credential system.