Controlled and cooperative updates of XML documents in byzantine and failure-prone distributed systems
This paper proposes an infrastructure and related algorithms for the controlled and cooperative updates of XML documents. Key components of the proposed system are a set of XML-based languages for specifying access-control policies and the path that the document must follow during its update. Such path can be fully specified before the update process begins or can be dynamically modified by properly authorized subjects while being transmitted. Our approach is fully distributed in that each party involved in the process can verify the correctness of the operations performed until that point on the document without relying on a central authority. More importantly, the recovery procedure also does not need the participation of a central authority. Our approach is based on the use of some special control information that is transmitted together with the document and a suite of protocols. We formally specify the structure of such control information and the protocols. We also analyze security and complexity of the proposed protocols.

title: An integrated approach to federated identity and privilege management in open systems
abstract: Online partnerships depend on federations of not only user identities but also of user entitlements across organizational boundaries.

title: Access control enforcement for conversation-based web services
abstract: Service Oriented Computing is emerging as the main approach to build distributed enterprise applications on the Web. The widespread use of Web services is hindered by the lack of adequate security and privacy support. In this paper, we present a novel framework for enforcing access control in conversation-based Web services. Our approach takes into account the conversational nature of Web services. This is in contrast with existing approaches to access control enforcement that assume a Web service as a set of independent operations. Furthermore, our approach achieves a tradeoff between the need to protect Web service's access control policies and the need to disclose to clients the portion of access control policies related to the conversations they are interested in. This is important to avoid situations where the client cannot progress in the conversation due to the lack of required security requirements. We introduce the concept of k-trustworthiness that defines the conversations for which a client can provide credentials maximizing the likelihood that it will eventually hit a final state.

title: GEO-RBAC: a spatially aware RBAC
abstract: Securing access to data in location-based services and mobile applications requires the definition of spatially aware access control systems. Even if some approaches have already been proposed either in the context of geographic database systems or context-aware applications, a comprehensive framework, general and flexible enough to cope with spatial aspects in real mobile applications, is still missing. In this paper, we make one step towards this direction and we present GEO-RBAC, an extension of the RBAC model to deal with spatial and location-based information. In GEO-RBAC, spatial entities are used to model objects, user positions, and geographically bounded roles. Roles are activated based on the position of the user. Besides a physical position, obtained from a given mobile terminal or a cellular phone, users are also assigned a logical and device independent position, representing the feature (the road, the town, the region) in which they are located. To make the model more flexible and re-usable, we also introduce the concept of role schema, specifying the name of the role as well as the type of the role spatial boundary and the granularity of the logical position. We then extend GEO-RBAC to cope with hierarchies, modeling permission, user, and activation inheritance.

title: Object-oriented database management systems: concepts and issues
abstract: Requirements imposed on both the object data model and object management by the support of complex objects are outlined. The basic concepts of an object-oriented data model are discussed. They are objects and object identifiers, aggregation, classes and instantiation mechanisms, metaclasses, and inheritance. Object-oriented models are compared with semantic, relational, and Codasyl models. Object-oriented query languages and query processing are considered. Some operational aspects of data management in object-oriented systems are examined. Schema evolution is discussed.<<ETX>>

title: Database Monitoring in U-Datalog

title: On the Number of Descendants in an Object DAG
abstract: In this paper we address the problem of evaluating the expected number of descendants for an object set in a directed acyclic graph. We prove an exact formula for the descendant number when the distribution of the set fanout is known. Also, we derive an approimated formula expressed in terms of the average fanout.