Gail-Joon Ahn, Secure Information Sharing within a Collaborative Environment

The Internet is uniquely and strategically positioned to address the needs of a growing segment of population in a very cost-effective way. It provides tremendous connectivity and immense information sharing capability which the organizations can use for their competitive advantage. Several organizations have transited from their old and disparate business models based on ink and paper to a new, consolidated ones based on digital information on the Internet. However, information sharing on the Internet usually occurs in broad, highly dynamic network-based environments, and formally accessing the resources in a secure manner poses a difficult challenge. Balancing the competing goals of collaboration and security is difficult because interaction in collaborative systems is targeted towards making people, information, and resources available to all who need it, whereas information security seeks to ensure the integrity of these elements while providing it only to those with proper authorization. As organizations implement information strategies that call for sharing access to resources in the networked environment, mechanisms must be provided to protect the resources from adversaries. This talk addresses the issue of how to advocate selective information sharing in collaborative systems through access control schemes while minimizing the risks of unauthorized access proposing a delegation framework. It also introduces a systematic approach to specify delegation and revocation policies using a set of rules. The feasibility of the proposed framework is also discussed through policy specification, enforcement, and a proof-of-concept implementation. About the speaker: Gail-Joon Ahn is an assistant professor of Software and Information Systems Department at University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a coordinator of Laboratory of Information Integration, Security and Privacy which has been designated as a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education by National Security Agency. His principal research and teaching interests are in information and systems security. Ahn received PhD and MS degrees from George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, and BS degree in Computer Science from SoongSil University, Seoul, Korea. His research foci include access control, security architecture for distributed objects, and secure e-commerce systems and his research has been supported by NSF, NSA, DoD, Bank of America, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Ahn is currently an information director of ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC).