The aim of the “Secure Space” project, short for “A Secure Space for Collaborative Security Services”, was to investigate a new approach for autonomous participants to collaborate on a shared business process across enterprise boundaries in the Internet.
Today, “cloud”-based services is the preferred way used for communication and collaboration among business entities. However, in cases where issues like autonomy of the participants, data security and privacy are of prime concern, collaboration via “cloud”-based services might not be the most preferable solution due to the centralized deployment of these services.
The “Secure Space” project proposes an alternative approach via shared data structures that are maintained in a shared distributed space. Although the original idea is already around for 20 years and distinguishes itself through its simplicity and elegance, only a few practical systems evolved. The “Secure Space” project extended the concept by adding a powerful programming model and by adapting best security practices. The result is a distributed system which allows autonomous participants to collaborate while maintaining their own security and privacy. All participants contribute to the overall business process very much like individuals working together toward a shared goal. No central authority or control is required: Every participant grabs activities that it is able to perform from the shared space and adds activities to the shared space for others to perform.
The “Secure Space” project demonstrated the usefulness and practicability of the approach using a distributed management of firewalls. In this example, firewalls are assigned common goals – like the establishment of specific communication tunnels or the common evaluation of intrusion detections. The firewalls use the Secure Space to collaborate and to report the result of the business process to a management console.
Additional information on the SBC paradigm and the XVSM middleware can be found at www.xvsm.org. The open source Java implementation of XVSM, which was advanced during the course of the project and has served as a foundation for the Secure Space implementation, can be downloaded at www.mozartspaces.org/2.2-SNAPSHOT/.
