A Distributed Service Registry for Resource Sharing among Ad-hoc Dynamic Coalitions

Abstract In a dynamic coalition environment, it is essential to allow automatic sharing of resources among coalition members. The challenge is to facilitate such sharing while adhering to the security policies of each coalition. To accomplish this, a dynamic coalition-based access control (DCBAC) has been proposed earlier, where security policies enforced by each coalition member are published in a centralized coalition service registry (GSR). In this paper, we propose a distributed coalition service registry (DCSR) system. In the DCSR system, several service registry agents cooperate to provide controlled access to resources. Distribution of the registries results in improved availability, higher concurrency, better response times to user queries, and enhanced flexibility. We employ secure group multicasting to communicate among the DCSR agents. The paper outlines the DCSR system, the supported functionalities and its underlying infrastructure. 1