A Network-Centric Design for Relationship-Based Security and Access Control

As part of the Stanford Digital Libraries Project, we have prototyped a novel architecture for security and access control in heterogeneous, networked environments. Conceptually, this architecture recasts security issues from an “information access” metaphor into a “relationship management” framework and uniformly applies a contracting model. Architecturally, it introduces a “network-centric” design that generalizes previous models of clientor server-centered control into a third, relationship-based form.