Abstract
It is often necessary for organizations to come together in a coalition to share services, without prior planning, to accomplish certain tasks. The dynamic coalition-based access control (DCBAC) model facilitates the formation of dynamic coalitions through the use of a registry service, where available services can be advertised by potential coalition members. The central component of the DCBAC model is the distributed coalition service registry (DCSR). Depending upon the levels of service needed by the service providers and requesters, DCSR provides different functionality. We define three levels of DCSR services: (i) Registry Service (ii)Authenticator Service, and (iii) Query Service. For the last service, DCSR answers a specific question directly by using the information resources of service providers, when the requester has needed credentials. No direct interactions are needed between the coalition members in this level of service. In this paper, we describe our service-oriented approach to DCSR design and show the flexibility that it offers. The design features are tested through a prototype DCBAC system built using the .Net framework.