Collaborative Research: Models and Mechanisms for Data-Level Security

Universal access to the WWW has made security a top issue. New problems have arisen in areas such as legally mandated privacy policies and protecting intellectual property. Collaborative arrangements need to be created and ended, rapidly. Systems architectures have become far more complex, so data requires protection in documents, messaging systems, and application servers. Most crucially, there are too few people skilled either in specifying policies, or in the technical means of enforcing them. We need solid new concepts to simplify this environment and to enable building new tools. A grand challenge for data security is to make large-scale administration easy enough that ordinary organizations will do it well.