Supporting Ad-hoc Collaboration with Group-based RBAC Model

With the increasing accessibility of information and data, role-based access control (RBAC) has become a popular technique for security and privacy purposes. However, trusted collaboration between different groups in large corporate Intranets is still an unresolved problem. The challenge is how to extend existing access control model for efficient security management and administration to allow trusted collaboration between different groups. In this paper, we propose a group-based RBAC model (GB-RBAC) for this purpose. In particular, virtual group is proposed in our model to allow secure information and resource sharing in multi-group collaboration environments. All the members of a virtual group build trust relation between themselves and are authorized to join the collaborative work. The scheme and strategies provided in this paper meet the requirements of security, autonomy, and privacy for collaborations. As a result, our scheme provides an easy way to employ RBAC policies to secure ad-hoc collaboration