Proceedings of the 2nd UK Virtual Reality Conference

Security is always a critical issue for any software system that will be used in the realworld. This is particularly true where the system is to be shared between multiple users. This paper proposes the basis of an approach to access control for distributed collaborative virtual environments. Our approach combines two concepts; i) access control, and ii) the concept of boundaries (Bowers 93), which segment space into regions. The result is a new approach to access control where access is governed according to the space within which subjects and objects reside and whether a subject can traverse space in order to get close to an object. This focus on access control means that we are interested in general techniques for managing individual and group access to resources and are ignoring, for the time being, related security issues such as authenticating user's identities and auditing their actions. The idea of boundaries segmenting space and acting as barriers results in the notion of an a..