Research Article
Transparent Security for Collaborative Environments
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/COLCOM.2007.4553814, author={Eva Hladk\^{a} and Daniel Kouřil and Michal Proch\^{a}zka and Luděk Matyska and Petr Holub}, title={Transparent Security for Collaborative Environments}, proceedings={3rd International ICST Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharin}, publisher={IEEE}, proceedings_a={COLLABORATECOM}, year={2008}, month={6}, keywords={Application software Authentication Collaboration Collaborative software Collaborative tools Collaborative work Environmental management Hardware Middleware Security}, doi={10.1109/COLCOM.2007.4553814} }- Eva Hladká
Daniel Kouřil
Michal Procházka
Luděk Matyska
Petr Holub
Year: 2008
Transparent Security for Collaborative Environments
COLLABORATECOM
IEEE
DOI: 10.1109/COLCOM.2007.4553814
Abstract
Current collaborative tools are often not able to profit from existing systems for user management. It is therefore necessary for collaborative systems to administrate their users using their own solutions, which may not be adequate in terms of scalability or security. Many users may also experience problems working with authentication credentials (e.g. digital certificates) employed by collaborative systems. In this paper, we propose a general framework to provide easy-to-use yet secure access to collaborative systems, which offers a general middleware layer to accommodate various types of collaborative tools. The framework utilizes the emerging model of federations, which allows to provide a user-friendly means of logging in to a collaborative system as well as a solid basis for specifying access control policies. The framework handles all security aspects in a transparent way without requiring the users to perform complicated tasks. Using user attributes maintained in the federation, it is also possible to implement efficient and dynamic group management of the collaborating users.