Secure Interoperation

Dynamic inter-domain collaborations and resource sharing comprise two key characteristics of mobile Grid systems. However, inter-domain collaborations have proven to be vulnerable to conflicts that can lead to privilege escalation. These conflicts are detectable in inter-operation policies, and occur due to cross-domain role relationships. In addition, resource sharing requires to be enhanced with resource usage management in virtual organizations where mobile nodes act as resource providers. In this case the enforcement of resource usage policies and quality of service policies are required to be supported due to the limited capabilities of the devices. Yet, the ANSI INCITS 359-2004 standard RBAC model provides neither any policy conflict resolution mechanism among domains, nor any resource usage management functionality. In this paper, we propose the domRBAC model for access control in mobile Grid systems at a low administrative overhead. The domRBAC is defined as an extension of the standardized RBAC by incorporating additional functionality to cope with requirements posed by the aforementioned systems. As a result, domRBAC facilitates collaborations among domains under secure inter-operation, and provides support for resource usage management in the context of multi-domain computing environments, where mobile nodes operate as first-class entities.

Modern collaborative systems such as the Grid computing paradigm are capable of providing resource sharing between users and platforms. These collaborations need to be done in a transparent way among the participants of a virtual organization (VO). A VO may consist of hundreds of users and heterogeneous resources. In order to have a successful collaboration, a list of vital importance requirements should be fulfilled, viz. collaboration among domains, to ensure a secure environment during a collaboration, the ability to enforce usage constraints upon resources, and to manage the security policies in an easy and efficient way. In this article, we propose an enhanced role based access control model entitled domRBAC for collaborative applications, which is based on the ANSI INCITS 359-2004 access control model. The domRBAC is capable of differentiating the security policies that need to be enforced in each domain and to support collaboration under secure inter-operation. Cardinality constraints along with context information are incorporated to provide the ability of applying simple usage management of resources for the first time in a role-based access control model. Furthermore, secure inter-operation is assured among collaborating domains during role assignment automatically and in real-time. Yet, domRBAC, as an RBAC approach, intrinsically inherits all of its virtues such as ease of management, and separation of duty relationships with the latter also being supported in multiple domains. As a proof of concept, we implement a simulator based on the definitions of our proposed access control model and conduct experimental studies to demonstrate the feasibility and performance of our approach.