Closed User Groups in Internet Service Centres

The paper presents a model for end-user directed access control to services in Internet service centres that, beside the classical Internet services (e.g., e-mail), offer a multitude of new services (e.g., on-line conferencing and auctioning) over the Internet. The model is based on the concept of closed user groups. The main idea is that at creation time each service instance and its components are assigned to a user group previously formed by a subset of the end-users, and access control is performed for access attempts through checking the group assignment of the accessed resource against the group memberships of the authenticated accessing end-user. Access control is directed by the end-users through the management of group memberships. We describe the concept of closed user groups, the management of group memberships, the enforcement of access control, and the realisation with off-the-shelf software for a middleware based service environment, which is haracterised by the use of CORBA, Java, and WWW technology.