| A Dynamic Coalition is the type of coalition in which the membership of the coalition and trust relationships between members could dynamically change and nonsymmetric trust relationships may exist. This research designs an infrastructure for managing Dynamic Coalitions. To control the information incorporated in the Dynamic Coalition, a Secure Information Management System (SIMS) is designed and implemented. The SIMS is an information handling system that separates the file storage and file access authorization functions. The architecture and the semantics of “directives” are defined for the system. Directives are the set of resource access control rules, which are based on the trust levels that exist between partners or agents and members of the Dynamic Coalition. In addition, through the information handling system, quasi-partnerships are defined as the potential relationships between the members that do not have direct explicit partnerships. In this dissertation, a set of prototypes is designed and implemented to investigate the resource access control based on the partnership and quasi-partnership in the Dynamic Coalition. In addition to the above, the ticket system is introduced. The ticket system is designed to handle more flexible resource access control by binding the directives, the permissions, and the authentication information on the ticket, which is a credential for the resource access. |
