Security Enforcement in Activity Management Systems

Abstract

Security enforcement is an issue of paramount importance for any system that facilitates computer supported cooperative work. An activity management system is a software that facilitates specification and decomposition, and execution of activities. An activity is a set of coordinated tasks (atomic activities). The focus of this paper is on supporting security in activity management systems. In particular, we present an architecture, and describe the mechanisms that need to be incorporated for enforcing security for activity specification and decomposition, and during activity execution. This paper provides a task-centered approach towards security enforcement, wherein, the security constraints are checked and the task is allowed to be executed only if none of the security constraints are violated. This is handled by the event-condition-action rule paradigm from active database systems.

Article Footnote

This work is partly supported Hong Kong Special Admistrative Region Research Grants Council’s Earmarked Research Grant HKUST 747/96E