Organization responsible: Thales Research & Technolog NL

People involved:

• Bernard van Veelen, TRT-NL

Project description:

Besides the traditional security issues (authentication, authorization, etc), specific security issues must be addressed considering real-time information management and software agents. One issue is the granularity of the protection: for different entities different levels of information protection may apply in a single information element.

For information stored in a database this is no problem unless it is unstructured information (text, audio, and video documents) stored in a data base i.e. how can we apply usage and integrity restrictions to chapters, paragraphs or second 20 to 45 of a video etc.

Once information is physically forwarded and out of control of an agent or database, inheritance of the protection properties and to secure that information accordingly is still an issue. When information is physically forwarded (as opposed to accessed while located in a secure data base), can protection still be effective along the 'information chain'? To cope with that problem solutions sacrifice granular protection, a communication channel for example protects 'everything' at the same protection level.

This workpackage is concerned with finding strategies and technologies to apply a fine-grained security policy that secures individual items of data-space elements taking into account the accessing entities as well as the data space infrastructure.

Note: in Q3/2008 this project was merged into WP 4.3.

Publications: (none)