A Virtual Enterprise Oriented Access Control Mechanism

Virtual enterprise is a temporary alliance of enterprises that come together to share skills, core competencies or resources. The members in virtual enterprise need to collaborate in a distributed, dynamic, open and heterogeneous environment. Traditional Access control mechanisms, which serve the single enterprises, are not suitable for virtual enterprise. By incorporating task delegation, trust management and cryptography technology, we proposed a virtual enterprise oriented Access Control (VEOAC) mechanism. In VEOAC, a source of authority VECA is introduced and all member enterprises have their own access control system and they trust that source of authority. Using delegation logic the private access control rules are securely enforced. VEOAC can protect the resource of each member in virtual enterprise more efficiently.