PROPOSAL NUMBER: 0411961 PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Tripathi, Anand INSTITUTION: University of Minnesota-Twin Cities PROPOSAL TITLE: Secure Context-Aware Distributed Collaboration Systems
An important need in today's computing environments is to support ubiquitous collabora-tive activities involving mobile users working across different autonomous organiza-tions. In such activities, the security policies for resource access and user interactions are generally required to be context-based. A user context may be based on various aspects such as physical location, network domain, roles in activities, user interface devices, and any temporal constraints. A mobile user needs to be given access to local and remote re-sources based on the current context. Moreover, it is desired that resource discovery and binding functions are executed transparently and proactively by the application environ-ment and the underlying infrastructure services. Such ubiquitous collaboration environ-ments need decentralized mechanisms for managing and enforcing policies for resource discovery, binding, and protection. The primary focus of this project is on developing system level mechanisms for constructing secure context-aware ubiquitous collaboration environments from their high level specifications. The specification model will support expression of context-based dynamic security policies for users, applications, as well as service/resource providers. This project will result in a middleware framework to realize from specifications a desired environment with context-based policies. This framework will include mechanisms for proactive discovery and transparent binding of resources for an application. It will support construction of context-aware smart environments by mod-eling infrastructure services as autonomous agents interacting with mobile users. Mecha-nisms based on distributed trust and delegation will be included for decentralized policy enforcement. The infrastructure resulting from this work will be made available for re-search and education.
Dr. Brett D. Fleisch Program Director, CISE/CNS May 26, 2004. .
