This paper appears in: Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on
Publication Date: June 2009 Volume: 21, Issue: 6


Abstract
A global education system, as a key area in future IT, has fostered developers to provide various learning systems with low cost. While a variety of e-learning advantages has been recognized for a long time and many advances in e-learning systems have been implemented, the needs for effective information sharing in a secure manner have to date been largely ignored, especially for virtual university collaborative environments. Information sharing of virtual universities usually occurs in broad, highly dynamic network-based environments, and formally accessing the resources in a secure manner poses a difficult and vital challenge. This paper aims to build a new rule-based framework to identify and address issues of sharing in virtual university environments through role-based access control (RBAC) management. The framework includes a role-based group delegation granting model, group delegation revocation model, authorization granting, and authorization revocation. We analyze various revocations and the impact of revocations on role hierarchies. The implementation with XML-based tools demonstrates the feasibility of the framework and authorization methods. Finally, the current proposal is compared with other related work.