Licit: Administering Usage Licenses in Federated Environments

We address the problem of usage license administration in federated settings. This problem arises whenever organizations, such as educational or research groups or institutions, share resources for business and scientific reasons. In such settings, each user´s usage of a licensed resource is typically supported by the user´s organization. License administration involves satisfying legal requirements while applying organizational strategies for effective resource usage, and carrying out suitable accounting and audit controls. We propose an approach, Licit, wherein an agent represents each resource sharing site and administers licenses in collaboration with other agents. We show how to represent a variety of usage licenses formally as executable policies and provide a simple information model using which each party can specify both the attributes involved in its licenses and how to resolve them. Our architecture naturally accommodates a variety of site-specific (i.e., custom) strategies for license administration. Licit has been implemented in a popular open source framework for virtual computing, and yields performance results indicating its practical feasibility.