Secure third party distribution of XML data

Web-based third-party architectures for data publishing are today receiving growing attention, due to their scalability and the ability of efficiently managing large numbers of users and great amounts of data. In such architecture security is a primary challenge. Main security properties that should be considered are: confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity. Additionally to these traditional security requirements, we are interested in a further security property, that is, completeness. By completeness we mean that the user receiving a portion of data can verify whether he/she has received all the information is allowed to see according to the specified access control policies. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework for a secure third party distribution of XML data. In particular, the framework is able to enforce all the above-mentioned properties, by exploiting encryption and non-conventional signature techniques.