Research Article
Towards a Secure and Borderless Collaboration between
Organizations: An Automated Enforcement Mechanism
Samira Haguouche and Zahi Jarir
LISI Laboratory, Faculty of Sciences Semlalia, Cadi Ayyad University, Marrakech, Morocco
Correspondence should be addressed to Samira Haguouche; s.haguouche@uca.ma
Received 13 July 2018; Accepted 4 October 2018; Published 21 October 2018
Academic Editor: Kuo-Hui Yeh
Copyright © 2018 Samira Haguouche and Zahi Jarir. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.
During the last decade, organizations have been more and more aware of the benefts of engaging in collaborative activities. To
attain a required collaborative objective, they are obligated to share sensitive resources such as data, services, and knowledge.
However, sharing sensitive and private resources and exposing them for an external usage may prevent the organizations
involved from collaborating. Terefore, this usage requires more preoccupation with security issues. Access control is one of
these required security concerns. Several access control models are defned in the literature and this multitude of models creates
heterogeneity of access control policies between the collaborating organizations. In this paper, we propose Access Control in Cross-
Organizational coLLABoration ACCOLLAB, a solution for automatic mapping between heterogeneous access control policies in
cross-organizational collaboration. To carry out this mapping, we suggest a mechanism founded mainly on XACML profles and
on a generic language derivative of XACML we defne as Generic-XACML. We also formally prove that the mapping does not
afect decision evaluation of policies. Tereby the proposed contribution ACCOLLAB allows each collaborating organization to
communicate their access control policies and adopt other’s policies without afecting their existing access control systems.
1. Introduction and Motivation
Collaborative activities have received a lot of attention from
organizations due to the important need to address spe-
cifc and common goals, to combine knowledge, skills, and
experiences, to share resources (data, services, knowledge,
and/or expertise) to meet a particular task. To succeed such
collaboration, involved actors must frst trust each other and
communicate efectively to overcome the obstacles brought
about by the benefts of collaboration.
During the last decade organizations have been more
and more aware of the benefts of engaging in collaborative
activities. Ten in most of cases and in order to attain
an ultimate objective or to answer required needs, they
are obligated to share sensitive resources such as data, ser-
vices, and knowledge. However, sharing sensitive and private
resources, especially data and services, and exposing them
for an external usage may prevent the organizations involved
from collaborating. Hence, the focus on protecting data pri-
vacy and security issues in interorganizational collaboration
represents a crucial requirement and becomes one of the most
pressing concerns. Security issues aim at guaranteeing infor-
mation availability, confdentiality, integrity, authenticity, and
accountability. Data privacy known also as data protection
aims to prevent sensitive information from being leaked or
breached to unauthorized parties.
Several scientifc research studies in the literature have
raised this challenge, and identifed that access control is one
of the most important concerns of privacy and security. A
number of access control models such as RBAC [1], TBAC
[2], and ABAC [3] have been developed to address various
aspects of access control problem.
In cross-organizational collaboration, additional require-
ments for access control arise like trust management, high
level of privacy, interoperability, and dynamicity. Several
access control solutions proposed in the literature have
addressed this challenge. Some of them have proposed out-
right a new access control model [4, 5], or extended existing
models to be suitable for cross-organizational collaboration
[6, 7]. However, most of the suggested solutions require that
Hindawi
Security and Communication Networks
Volume 2018, Article ID 1572812, 13 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/1572812