On Policies for Bartering Access to Resources

Resource access management in modern ICT systems usually authorizes access to resources based on factors like identities, roles, and possibly attributes of the requester, the requested resource, and the environment. However, traditional approaches to access control do not fit well with collaborative scenarios where, typically, users can define their own policies allowing access to their resources provided that some conditions on the accessibility of other resources are met. In this paper, we introduce Bart, a language to specify attribute-based access policies for bartering resource access among the parties of a distributed system. Using Bart, each party can independently define policies to control access to their resources, including specific conditions that may require agreement with other parties to access additional resources. Subsequently, based on the policies currently in force within the system, the evaluation process – triggered on demand to determine whether an access request can be granted – automatically manages the bartering of resource access among policies.