Role Based Access Control Manager For Digital Library Systems Based On .Net Framework

Libraries have been serving people's needs to easily locate information throughout history. However, with the advent of computers and the Interuet, the traditional information access methods are being supplanted with and increasingly displaced by new digital methods. Information accessibility is no longer completely dependent on location. Digital Libraries further extend this by providing access to organized collections over the Interuet. Security therefore is very crucial in the management of these Libraries, especially when they are opened to the outside world, as in the case of Web-Based Digital Library Systems. Security cannot however be addressed in a consistent way without integrating some form of access control.Several access control models have been proposed so far for regulating access to digital contents. By focusing on access authorizations and disregarding Copyrights and Intellectual Property Laws, these models fail to provide a holistic approach to access control, Copyright and Intellectual Property Laws. The consequence is the violation of Copyright and Intellectual Property laws relating to the safeguard of Digital information. Such conventional access control Models provide static access control in the sense that a user will receive the same set of permissions until it is changed by a system administrator. In moderu systems such as DLMS, such a situation will be inappropriate. Users' permissions should not solely depend on their respective identities, but it must be influenced by the context in which access is requested.This thesis addresses these problems through a holistic approach, with the endresult of proposing a context-sensitive access control model called Role Based Access Control Manager (RBACM). The uniqueness of our approach is that the evaluation of roles, attributes, and policies takes place dynamically. The association of a policy with a user and specific material does not occur until the user wishes to access the material. The enforcement of Copyright rules in the general security framework of the Digital Library is part of the overall design of the system. The architecture of RBACM is based on a Role-Based Access Control that uses the capabilities of XML and on current Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) principles.