Towards a multi-dimensional characterization of dissemination control

Dissemination control (DCON) is emerging as one of the most important and challenging goals for information security. DCON is concerned with controlling information and digital objects even after they have been delivered to a legitimate recipient. The need for DCON arises in many different domains ranging from the dissemination of digital music and movies, eBooks, business proprietary and sensitive electronic documents as well as the propagation of mailing lists in relation to direct marketing. Our goal in this short paper is to present some of the multidimensional technical issues that need to be modeled and understood so as to provide a comprehensive set of DCON capabilities. It represents a first but necessary step in our ongoing work in formulating a family of DCON models.