Access Control in Decentralised Publish/Subscribe Systems

Publish/subscribe has emerged as an attractive communication paradigm for building Internet-wide distributed systems by decoupling message senders from receivers. Large scale publish/subscribe systems are likely to employ components of the event transport network owned by cooperating, but independent organisations. As the number of participants in the network increases, security becomes an increasing concern. So far most of the research on publish/subscribe has focused on efficient event routing, event filtering, and composite event detection. Very little research has been published regarding securing publish/subscribe systems. This paper extends our previous work to present and evaluate a secure multi-domain publish/subscribe infrastructure that supports and enforces fine-grained access control over the individual attributes of event types.