A Security Framework for Collaborative Distributed System Control at the Device-Level

In today's globalized business world, outsourcing, joint ventures, and cross-border collaborations have led to work environments that are geographically distributed across organizational and national boundaries. There are critical research needs to develop highly secured collaborative work environments and security solutions for deployment, configuration, monitoring, and device control of interoperating services. This paper presents a well-shaped security framework for distributed system control with a focus on device-level system control, monitoring and services re-configuration in open and dynamic environments. The characteristics of portability, reconfigurability, interoperability, and interchangeability of these new environments are considered as key factors to produce new security risks and challenges. By adopting Public Key cryptography, software agent and XML binding technologies, the major security problems of authenticity, integrity, confidentiality, and safe execution are addressed in this framework. The core modules for secure task delivery and execution are presented in detail.