Collaborative Research: CT-ISG: Secure Knowledge Management: Models and Mechanisms

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The advancement in computer technology produced large volumes of data, which motivated the investigation of database technology (especially database management systems) that has been proven successful in maintaining and utilizing the ever-increasing volumes of collected, generated or derived data. This collaborative project (IIS-0524612, Shouhuai Xu, University of Texas at San Antonio and IIS-0524462, Ravinderpal S. Sandhu, George Mason University) envisions the emergence of a new era in which it becomes important to share the knowledge derived from the large volumes of data in the process of problem solving, e.g., business decision-making. In order to facilitate such a task, this project explores technical methods that can help fulfill a system middleware called knowledge management systems -- analogous to the database management systems. In particular, this project focuses on addressing the security aspect of this envisioned middleware, which includes secure knowledge-extraction and secure knowledge-dissemination. Both security problems are addressed with sound security models and mechanisms. The security mechanisms include the following: (1) designing a variety of schemes, including cryptographic and non-cryptographic, to facilitate secure and practical knowledge-extraction; (2) developing methods for mitigation of the damage due to knowledge-breaching that is inevitable in the course of knowledge-dissemination; and (3) full exploration of the notion of (dynamic) policy-directed knowledge-dissemination and its cryptographic-based implementation. This inter-institutional collaborative project will provide a team-oriented learning and research environment for graduate students, and research results will also be integrated into educational courses. The aim for this project is that the results developed in this project, i.e., the models and mechanisms for knowledge management and safe knowledge dissemination will be integrated into the implementation of knowledge management systems in the future. The results of this project will be disseminated via the project web site http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~shxu/research/skm-nsf-2005/.