Access control for collaborative environments
Honghai Shen, Prasun Dewan · 1992
Access control is an indispensable part of any information sharing system.Collaborative environments introduce new requirements for access control, which cannot be met by using existing models developed for non-collaborative domains.We have developed a new access control model for meeting these requirements, The model is based on a generalized editing model of collaboration, which assumes that usersinteract with a collaborative application by concurrently editing its data structures, It associates fine-grained data displayed by a collaborative application with a set of collaboration rights and provides programmers and users a multi-dimensional, inheritance-based scheme for specifying theserights.The collaboration rights include traditional read and write rights and severat new rights such as viewing rights and coupling rights.The inheritance-based scheme groups subjects, protected objects, and access rights; allows each component of an access specification to refer to both groups and individual members; and allows a specific accessdefinition to override a more generat one.