Trust-based access control for collaborative systems

Abstract

In distributed, heterogeneous and network-connected collaborative environments where resources are provided to diverse unknown users for their applications, it is necessary to define access control for resources. Access control for such systems is defined as the ability to authorise or repudiate access to resources by a particular user. Traditional access control solutions are inherently inadequate for collaborative systems because they are effective only in situations where the system knows in advance which users are going to access the resources and what are their access rights so that they can be predefined by the developers or security administrators, but in collaborative systems the number of users as well as their usage on resources is not static. Targeting collaborative systems, a fine grained, flexible, persistent trust-based model for protecting the access and usage of digital resources is defined in this paper using radial basis function neural network (RBFNN). RBFNN classifies the users requesting the resources as trustworthy and non-trustworthy based on their attributes. RBFNN is used for classification because of its ability to generalise well for even unseen data and non-iterative method employed in its training. A proof of concept implementation backed by extensive set of tests on the real data collected for one such collaborative systems, i.e. Enabling Grids for E-Science grid demonstrated that the design is sound for collaborative systems where access of resources are provided to large and unknown users with their variant set of requirements.