High-Level Security Issues in Multimedia/Hypertext Systems

Multimedia/hypertext systems are growing at an enormous rate. A large variety of trans­actions take place over the Internet. We have today different types of documents available as hypertext on the WWW for these transactions. WWW is the major platform for world-wide transfer of documents. The security of these documents is a top priority issue but this is a relatively neglected area. Most of the existing work focuses on low-level aspects. We look here at the high-level security measures available today, different combinations of security models, different types of documents and the effect of the system environment. We indicate directions for future research.