PBKM: A Secure Knowledge Management Framework

We envision knowledge management systems as a platform facilitating the extraction, storage, retrieval, integration, transformation, visualization, analysis, dissemination, and utilization of knowledge. We present a system framework for secure knowledge management systems which, in addition to implementing the functionality of knowledge management and providing standard security mechanisms such as access control, possesses three new features: privacy-preservation which should be ensured in a knowledge-extraction procedure, breaching-awareness which should be taken into consideration in the knowledge-dissemination procedure, and abuse-accountability whereby an abuser (typically an insider) or the abusers can be held accountable. We explore this framework by elaborating on its components and their relationship to existing techniques such as database, cryptography, data mining, and machine learning. We also identify a number of challenging problems for further research.