Modelling Collaboration in Trusted Multi-agency Environment

Security problems in collaboration work are less well understood than those in the business and defence worlds. Earlier work in the medical area in Britain has highlighted some of the principles involved but has neglected some important areas. Most of the security models developed to date are inadequate in the collaboration area. We develop a perspective for policies and models that is task-based on a need-toknow basis. These policies can be represented as Petri nets to identify the functions and states involved. We have also developed a general architecture for a secure collaborative environment. An example is given of the application of our techniques to a problem involving negotiation, decision and agreement in a collaboration environment