Security in distributed digital libraries: issues and challenges

Providing security for digital libraries is challenging due to their dynamic and distributed nature. The need for security for digital libraries arises from legal, social and sensitivity issues of information. Increased dependence on agent-based architectures for digital libraries and peer-to-peer communications makes them more vulnerable to security threats. Thus, evolving a comprehensively secure distributed digital library system is challenging. In addition to the security guarantees, performance guarantees such as convenience in usage, minimal response time, and high throughput are also required of these systems. In this paper, we address the issues of integrating performance and security in digital libraries. We discuss a variety of security tools that are currently available and their impact on security and performance of digital library systems.