Content related rights transmission with MPEG-21 in the educational field

One of the main issues affecting educational content distribution and sharing is to ensure that the terms and conditions defined by the content owners are respected by the others, such as distributors and consumers. Authorship and the content integrity are the most basic rights that authors want to preserve in the educational field. To ensure that content and associated rights are protected, cryptographic techniques and mechanisms are applied to content, rights, protection keys and related metadata that are packaged in a digital object. ARMS is a new platform that was developed to preserve author rights in the educational field applying the MPEG-21 standard concepts. A web based services interface is established with the educational Academic Management System of the Academic institution in order to verify the user eligibility in this domain. After obtaining the usage license the user can send the license to other users, if that privilege has been granted. Our proposal uses MPEG-21 concepts in order to enable rights transmission among the main participants in the educational environment but with a mechanism where the inheritance rights established by the author are uphold. Through the integration between ARMS and the Academic Management Information System hosted in the educational institutions, user academic data can be retrieved in order to verify his eligibility.info:eu-repo/semantics/submittedVersio

Unified Model for Data Security -- A Position Paper

One of the most crucial components of modern Information Technology (IT) systems is data. It can be argued that the majority of IT systems are built to collect, store, modify, communicate and use data, enabling different data stakeholders to access and use it to achieve different business objectives. The confidentiality, integrity, availability, audit ability, privacy, and quality of the data is of paramount concern for end-users ranging from ordinary consumers to multi-national companies. Over the course of time, different frameworks have been proposed and deployed to provide data security. Many of these previous paradigms were specific to particular domains such as military or media content providers, while in other cases they were generic to different verticals within an industry. There is a much needed push for a holistic approach to data security instead of the current bespoke approaches. The age of the Internet has witnessed an increased ease of sharing data with or without authorisation. These scenarios have created new challenges for traditional data security. In this paper, we study the evolution of data security from the perspective of past proposed frameworks, and present a novel Unified Model for Data Security (UMDS). The discussed UMDS reduces the friction from several cross-domain challenges, and has the functionality to possibly provide comprehensive data security to data owners and privileged users

Design and semantics of a decentralized authorization language

We present a declarative authorization language that strikes a careful balance between syntactic and semantic simplicity, policy expressiveness, and execution efficiency. The syntax is close to natural language, and the semantics consists of just three deduction rules. The language can express many common policy idioms using constraints, controlled delegation, recursive predicates, and negated queries. We describe an execution strategy based on translation to Datalog with Constraints, and table-based resolution. We show that this execution strategy is sound, complete, and always terminates, despite recursion and negation, as long as simple syntactic conditions are met

A framework for usage management

This thesis proposes a formal framework for usage management in distributed systems. The principles of system design are applied in order to standardize certain features of the framework, such as the operational semantics, and leave free of standards areas that necessitate choice and innovation. The framework enables use of multiple policy languages, and dynamic interpretation of usage policies in different computing environments. In addition, the framework provides formal semantics to reason about interoperability of policies with respect to computing environments. The use of this framework in different usage management scenarios is demonstrated including multi-level security, cloud computing and digital rights management (DRM) systems. Furthermore, DRM is cast in a setting that allows the modeling of a number of current approaches within a game theoretic setting. Current strategies that attempt to influence the outcome of such games are analyzed, and a new type of architectural infrastructure that makes novel use of a trust authority is considered in order to create a suitable environment for constructing DRM games that may prove useful in the future

Designing Secure Access Control Model in Cyber Social Networks

Nowadays, information security in online communication has become an indisputable topic. People prefer pursuing their connection and public relations due to the greater flexibility and affordability of online communication. Recently, organizations have established online networking sites concerned with sharing assets among their employees. As more people engage in social network, requirements for protecting information and resources becomes vital. Over the years, many access control methods have been proposed. Although these methods cover various information security aspects, they have not provided an appropriate approach for securing information within distributed online networking sites. Moreover, none of the previous research provides an access control method in case an existing resource encompassing various parts and each part has its own accessing control policy. In this research, we investigate the access control requirements in order to conserve data and encompassed resources, which are shared in the social network, from users with unapproved access. Under the proposed method, users are able to define policies easily to protect their individual information and resources from unauthorized users. In addition, requestors are able to generate inquiries in easy and efficient way. We define an appropriate format to present rules and queries, which are converted from policies and inquiries respectively. The proposed approach defines a method in case a user would like to access a resource belonging to another user where both users are members of different online networking sites. In order to add more flexibility, this method controls access to data and resources by evaluating requestor’s attributes, object’s attributes, action or operation taken by requestor, environmental condition, and policies which are created by users or a super user of social network to protect the users’ resources. This approach is called Policy-Based Attribute Access Control (PBAAC). The policies defined to secure a resource may conflict with other policies. The proposed method offers an appropriate solution to resolve this issue. Due to achievement of better performance with regards to efficiency, this research analyzes the method to compromise simple rules, complex rules, or rules including several attributes. The results prove that simple rules provide better performance

A Logic-Based Framework for Web Access Control Policies

With the widespread use of web services, there is a need for adequate security and privacy support to protect the sensitive information these services could provide. As a result, there has been a great interest in access control policy languages which accommodate large, open, distributed and heterogeneous environments like the Web. XACML has emerged as a popular access control language, but because of its rich expressiveness and informal semantics, it suffers from a) a lack of understanding of its formal properties, and b) a lack of automated, compile-time services that can detect errors in expressive, distributed and heterogeneous policies. In this dissertation, I present a logic-based framework for XACML that addresses the above issues. One component of the framework is a Datalog-based mapping for XACML v3.0 that provides a theoretical foundation for the language, namely: a concise logic-based semantics and complexity results for full XACML and various fragments. Additionally, my mapping discovers close relationships between XACML and other logic based languages such as the Flexible Authorization Framework. The second component of this framework provides a practical foundation for static analysis of expressive XACML policies. The analysis services detect semantic errors or differences between policies before they are deployed. To provide these services, I present a mapping from XACML to the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which is the standardized language for representing the semantics of information on the Web. In particular, I focus on the OWL-DL sub-language, which is a logic-based fragment of OWL. Finally, to demonstrate the practicality of using OWL-DL reasoners as policy analyzers, I have implemented an OWL-based XACML analyzer and performed extensive empirical evaluation using both real world and synthetic policy sets