Secure Collaboration in a Mediator-Free Distributed Environment

Abstract

The Internet and related technologies have made multidomain collaborations a reality. Collaboration enables domains to effectively share resources; however it introduces several security and privacy challenges. Managing security in the absence of a central mediator is even more challenging. In this paper, we propose a distributed secure interoperability framework for mediator-free collaboration environments. We introduce the idea of secure access paths which enables domains to make localized access control decisions without having global view of the collaboration. We also present a path authentication technique for proving path authenticity. Furthermore, we present an on-demand path discovery algorithms that enable domains to securely discover paths in the collaboration environment. We implemented a simulation of our proposed framework and ran experiments to investigate the effect of several design parameters on our proposed access path discovery algorithm.