Collaborative pervasive computing applications can greatly improve the investigative capabilities and productivity of scientists and engineers in many fields. Users of such applications usually form groups to collaboratively perform their tasks, supported by their computing devices, including desktop computers, pocket PCs, and/or smart phones, over Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET), LAN and Internet. Users of collaborative pervasive computing applications usually need to share various types of data, including experimental data, sensitive documents, multimedia data, etc. In data sharing and management, a very important issue is trustworthiness. To support trustworthy data sharing and management among groups of users for collaborative pervasive computing applications, secure group communication, trustworthy shared data discovery, flexible access control mechanisms, effective data replication, data quality assurance mechanisms, and intrusion detection mechanisms are needed. So far, little research has been done in trustworthy shared data discovery and flexible access control mechanisms for collaborative pervasive computing environments.
In this proposal, an innovative approach is proposed to trustworthy shared data service management to provide users of collaborative pervasive computing applications with the capabilities of sharing, discovering and accessing shared data with high confidence. Our approach will be based on Web Services architecture, emerging OWL technology and our Reconfigurable Context-Sensitive Middleware (RCSM) and Secure Group Communication Service (SGCS). In our proposed approach, shared data services are used to provide access interfaces to shared data. Our proposed trustworthy shared data service management will include trustworthy shared data service specification and generation, shared data service discovery, and secure access to shared data services. The proposed research will generate a new trustworthy shared data service management technique, including an OWL-based trustworthy shared data service specification language, an automated service generation technique, a trustworthy shared data service discovery protocol and a lightweight situation-aware access control framework. The expected results will be implemented as a set of middleware components and services to support the development of trustworthy data sharing and management capability in collaborative pervasive computing applications. We will develop a demonstration application to demonstrate and evaluate our expected results.
The intellectual merits of the proposed research includes (a) using automatically generated web services as the unified interface for accessing shared data to overcome organizational barriers, (b) integrating access control policies with OWL-based data description and access interface specification to enhance semantic interoperability and enable intelligent service discovery, (c) incorporating situation-awareness in access control to enforce flexible high-grained access control policies based on the situation and different local access control models in various security domains, and (d) developing a lightweight, secure and fault-tolerant service discovery protocol.
The proposed research will have the following broader impacts: (1) The results of the proposed research can greatly improve the user confidence in collaborative pervasive computing applications and increase the effectiveness of collaborative research or development among scientists, engineers and/or businessmen in pervasive computing environments. (2) Since the proposed research is based on the widely accepted Web Services architecture and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) standards of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the results of the proposed research can be extended to general applications using Internet, Grid and Semantic Web, with increased trustworthiness. (3) The results of the proposed research will be included as a part of the senior/graduate level course on information assurance and a new graduate-level course on data and application security at Arizona State University. The new material in these courses should attract high-quality students to participate in research on cyber trust.
