Distributed Usage Control Architecture for Business Coalitions

The dynamic environment of business coalition (BC) requires a flexible access control approach to deal with user management and policy writing. However, the traditional approach applied to BC assigns to access control a burden, mainly to the service provider, thus requiring ad hoc schemes to mitigate the lack of controls developed to BC needs. We present a brokered access control architecture, based on UCON_ABC, to obtain an integrated usage control management for BC. The broker intermediates contract establishment between service provider and consumer, and derives from it the policies to regulate the usage at service-level. The consumer defines user-level policies to control the usage of the contracted services. We developed a Web services based prototype to evaluate the feasibility of our proposal. The proposed architecture enables distribution of duties and integration of usage control management in a loosely coupled fashion, providing the flexibility desired in BC environments.