Towards information sharing in virtual organisations: The development of an icon-based information control model

Alsalamah, Shada ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3054-5015, Hilton, Jeremy Charles and Burnap, Peter ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0396-633X 2010. Towards information sharing in virtual organisations: The development of an icon-based information control model. Presented at: The UK All Hands Meeting (AHM), Cardiff, UK, 13- 16 September 2010.

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Abstract

Today, innovation in information communication technology has encouraged contribution among different fields to tackle large-scale scientific problems or introduce novel inventories that, in both cases, demand extensive sharing of information among collaborating organisations in order to achieve the overall goal. Sharing information across different physical organisations, working as a single virtual organisation, raises a number of information security issues that limit the effectiveness, dynamism, and potential of collaborative working. Although extensive research has been conducted to provide secure information-sharing solutions within a single organisation, little research has investigated multi- organizational information-sharing environments where information requires to be protected but there are variations in information security needs and, in some cases, conflicts in applied information security controls. A key obstacle, the majority of research conducted in this area has overlooked, is not only the ability to govern remote access of users from one organisation to sensitive information stored in another organisation, but also having persistent control over owned information even after access has been granted and the information is either disseminated electronically, transformed into paper format, or even shared verbally. In addition, research was tailored to meet only specific research needs and address particular issues. Therefore, there is a lack of comprehensive, systematic approaches for controls on information usage shared electronically, regardless of specific circumstances. This paper aims to present a novel information control model that could keep information self-protected in dynamic collaborative environments by communicating information security needs along with the exchanged information using an Information Labelling Scheme. Based on SPIDER solution and Protective Commons, this scheme uses nine labelling icons (reflecting the protection type and level) associated with different information security controls (representing the information security mechanisms used to provide the protection). The model is demonstrated in the Microsoft Word 2007 application and a prototype has been developed as a plug-in software named Information Labelling Palette. It displays the nine self-explanatory icons in order for an information owner/user to label any information range within a single document using any icon. This consequently enforces the information security controls associated with the selected icon only into that particular range of electronic information, and secondly, communicates the information security needs to the recipient in a human-readable format, which would help keep recipients informed about how this information should be managed if printed out or shared verbally. Finally, the wide range of information security controls used in this proposed solution makes it widely applicable to meet the considerable diversity of organisations’ information security needs. Furthermore, it is believed to lay a solid foundation for future work in the area of information access control and control policy enforcement in collaborative environments.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Computer Science & Informatics
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Last Modified:	21 Oct 2022 11:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/42078

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