Trust-Based Formal Delegation Framework for Enterprise Social Networks

Collaborative environments raise major challenges to secure them. These challenges increase when it comes to the domain of Enterprise-Social-Networks (ESNs) as ESNs aim to incorporate the social technologies in an organization setup while asserting greater control of information security. In this context, the security challenges have taken a new shape as an ESN may not be limited to the boundaries of a single organization and users from different organizations can collaborate in a common federated environment. In this paper, we address the problem of the authorization´s delegation in federated collaborative environments like ESNs. In contrast to traditional XML based languages, such as XACML, our approach is based on event-calculus, a temporal logic programming formalism. Further, the traditional approaches are either user-centric or organization-centric. However, the domain of ESN requires to bridge the gap between them and the proposed framework deals with this challenge. In order to enhance the delegation scheme, we have proposed a behavior monitoring mechanism, that permits to assess principals´ trust level within the federated collaborative environment. We evaluate our trust computing approach based on simulated principals´ behaviors and discuss the obtained results.