Cross-Organizational Cooperation Framework for Security Management in Ubiquitous Computing Environment

Enabling cross-organizational cooperation in ubiquitous computing environments poses new security challenges that concern particularly the interoperability of security management systems and the security policies of each organization. In this paper, we present a semantic framework for cooperative security management processes design in a cross-organizational context. Our framework is based on a hybrid approach that caters between the advantages of bottom-up and top down approaches. The cooperation model of our framework is based on the composition of atomic security management processes, by using speech acts and ontologies, and their mapping with internal processes views. The establishment of an e-contract between partners allows specifying common terminology for exchanging messages, cooperation security policy and process control flows. A scenario of cooperative process is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed framework.