Title:   Access Control Mechanisms in Distributed XML Publishing Environments
Speaker: Bogdan Cautis (INRIA)

Abstract:

Controlling how data is accessed, used or modified is a main
concern in data management today.  When data has no centralized
control, preserving integrity, authenticity and privacy of
information is even harder. I will discuss in this talk some
security-related problems that are raised in non-centralized
environments. Starting from some old and new non-conventional
techniques for digital signing, we first consider the problem
of update control for published XML data. Specifically, update
restrictions are specified and enforced by cryptographic
signatures. To enable reasoning about the integrity properties of
data, we introduce a family of constraints for describing how an
XML document can evolve. For these constraints, we study the
implication problem in general and in the presence of
update-constrained data.
 
If time allows, I will also discuss other aspects of security and
access control. One of them is the privacy-conscious rewriting of
XML queries in a multi-party setting, when both data and access
policies are distributed.