Towards Coequal Authorization for Dynamic Collaboration

In dynamic collaboration, participants oftentimes need to share resources with each other under the same criteria. However, since each participant has its own authorization policies as a way of controlling resource access, their discrepancies make such collaboration difficult. It is desired to develop a practical and automatic way to generate the collaborative policies for coequal authorizations. In this paper, we investigate this problem by proposing an authorization framework based on the widely adopted XACML policy. Each practical XACML policy is converted into Boolean expressions and further refined as a set of atomic rules against the policy structure. With the rule set, the combination algorithms in policies and the collaboration preference of participants, the collaborative authorization policy is automatically generated. We analyze the consistency of the collaborative policies with previous authorization policies. Some experiments are performed to exam our approach and show that it can efficiently solve the problem of coequal authorizations.