A Unified Access Control Infrastructure Using Attributes and Ontology in E-Learning Resource Grids

A Unified Access Control Infrastructure is proposed to realize the fundamental security requirements of elearning resource grids. The infrastructure consists of augmented components placed on top of the new Web Service protocols. "Enhanced MyProxy", "Certification Authority" and "Attribute Authority" are used to implement the Grid Portal and satisfy the feature of "role"; the trust oriented "Registry", "Ontology-based Policy Converter" and "Policy Repository" are employed to carry out flexible authorization control and the unified security for many domains of different trust-roots; "Context Service" and related semantic mechanisms are introduced to enforce the adaptive access control; the adopted "Trust Proof" facilitates alleviating the workload of the PEP and PDP. Some associated profiles are introduced to coordinate these components for accommodating elearning resource applications. The system implements all the components on GT4.0 according to the new grid service standards, SAML and XACML profiles.