Concurrent History-based Usage Control Policies

The sharing of data and resources is one of the cornerstones of our society. However, this comes together with several challenges regarding the increasing need of guaranteeing security and privacy during both the access and the usage of such shared resources. Access control policies first, and usage control policies secondly, have been introduced to overcome issues related to the access and usage of resources. However, the introduction of distributed and cloud systems to share data and resources enables the concurrent and shared access to the same resources. Here we present an enhanced version of History-based Usage Control policies in which we are able to manage concurrent access and usage of resources by several subjects, whose actions may influence one another. Moreover, to ease the understanding of the proposed approach, we present a reference example where a document is shared among a set of people having different roles in a company.