Enhanced security management for flexible and dynamic cooperative environments

This paper deals with the challenge to create an authorization and authentication infrastructure for virtual knowledge spaces. Virtual knowledge spaces are a concept to build up flexible and adjustable environments for cooperative work and learning processes. When developing authorization concepts for virtual knowledge spaces, different boundary conditions have to be considered. Basically, we identify the specific requirements for the creation of coherent and intuitive rules to reduce the administrative complexity to a minimum and prevent mistakes. Furthermore we turn attention to flexibility of the authorization infrastructure as well as performance issues. The rights management described in this paper ought to fulfill these requirements.