Towards a framework for group-centric secure collaboration

The concept of groups is a natural aspect of most collaboration scenarios. Group-Centric Secure Information Sharing models (g-SIS) have been recently proposed in which users and objects are brought together to promote sharing and collaboration. Users may join, leave and re-join and objects may be added, removed and re-added. Furthermore, objects embodying new intellectual property may be created in the group during collaboration, some of which may flow back to the participating entities. Authorizations may depend on various aspects including time of join and add, the user's role, etc. In this paper, we outline three example scenarios of inter-organizational collaboration. We develop a complete authorization model for one of these scenarios comprising administrative and operational components. We conclude the paper by proposing an initial framework for developing more sophisticated models for inter-organizational collaboration.