ITR: Dynamic and Secure Distributed Collaborations

该项目的重点是开发概念基础以及用于快速构建动态和安全的分布式协作的中间件基础设施。该项目正在研究从高级规范构建动态协作环境的技术。这些规范与中间件交互，以构建所需的环境。该项目正在开发使用XML来指定协作计划的技术，以及用于实现这样的计划的基于移动代理的中间件的机制。协作规范通过参与者的角色标识协作中的参与者，并指定相关的基于角色的安全策略。它规定了共享对象以及参与者之间信息流的协调和工作流要求。对参与者动态加入或离开环境的机制进行了研究，包括对参与者的身份验证、角色分配和参与者发现资源的机制。这些机制和服务被集成在基于代理的中间件中，使用Ajanta代理编程系统来构建分布式协作。该中间件研究了移动代理在构建可移植的用户界面、执行远程协调动作以及作为移动工作流对象方面的使用。它还提供对资源发现、命名、事件管理和安全性的支持。

The focus of this project is on the development of conceptualfoundations along with a middleware infrastructure for rapidconstruction of dynamic and secure distributed collaborations. Thisproject is investigating techniques for constructing dynamiccollaboration environments from their high-level specifications. Thesespecifications are interfaced with a middleware to build the desiredenvironment. This project is developing techniques for specifying acollaboration plan using XML and mechanisms for a mobile agent basedmiddleware for implementing such a plan. A collaboration specificationidentifies the participants in a collaboration by their roles, and alsospecifies the associated role-based security policies. It specifies theshared objects together with the coordination and workflow requirementsfor information flow among the participants. Mechanisms are beinginvestigated for participants to dynamically join or leave an environment.These include mechanisms for authentication of a participant'scredentials, assignment of roles, and discovery of resources by aparticipant. These mechanisms and services are integrated in anagent based middleware, using the Ajanta agent programming system,for constructing distributed collaborations. This middleware investigatesuse of mobile agents for building transportable user interfaces,for executing remote coordination actions, and as mobile workflowobjects. It also provides support for resource discovery, naming, eventmanagement, and security.