Collaborative information service: Privacy algebra for user defined security

Abstract

With the increased activity over the internet and globalization of the market economy collaborative computing becomes an important area of research. Security is an increasing concern because of chances of malicious elements breaching the network of collaborating partners. Further the level of mutual belief among the collaborators would not be identical and may change with experience. Thus the concept of user defined flexible security requirements arose. The idea of user defined privacy template was brought in IRaaS (Information Retrieval as a Service) (Pal and Bose 2013) which is a flexible system of information services to customers who seek information from various sources through a service provider. The idea was further extended to CIS (Collaborative Information Service) (Pal and Bose 2016) which provides a framework for general information exchange activities (not restricted to retrievals only) for a set of collaborating partners. The current work extends CIS by introducing privacy algebra to be applied on templates to get a concise expression of privacy restrictions. CIS is a step towards a privacy aware collaborative computing problem. Copyright © 2016 by SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.