Security policy integration and conflict reconciliation for data integration across data sharing services in ubiquitous computing environments

Present data sharing and integration among collaborating organizations requires a central and trusted authority to check the users' requests before allowing the request to pass to the centralized repository to collect data from all data sources and integrate the collected data. Heterogeneity and dynamic nature of ubiquitous computing environments makes critical to generate an integrated security policy set to govern the interactions among the collaborating organizations. Each organization manages its own resources and can function autonomously and a group of collaborating organizations can be formed and changed at runtime. As organizations are peers to each other. Normally, there is no organization to serve as an authority to manage the interactions among various collaborating organizations. Due to these characteristics, we have the three major challenges for providing security in such environments: ambiguous security policy specifications, dynamic set of users and conflicting security policies. To address the given challenges and specify the access control policies a Security Policy Integration and Conflict Reconciliation (SPICR) layer is introduced between the user application and the repository for security policy negotiation and conflict reconciliation in policy-based ubiquitous environment. With our proposed layer, data sharing services can control the access, limit the usage of their shared data, and improves data sharing and efficiency of the data-centralized repository making the system scalable with little human intervention. The proposed layer performs security policy integration based on similarity policy adaptation algorithm and negotiation policy.