Securing collaborative environments

The diverse set of organizations and software components involved in a typical collaboratory make providing a seamless security solution difficult. In addition, the users need support for a broad range of frequency and locations for access to the collaboratory. A collaboratory security solution needs to be robust enough to ensure that valid participants are not denied access because of its failure. There are many tools that can be applied to the task of securing collaborative environments and these include public key infrastructure, secure sockets layer, Kerberos, virtual and real private networks, grid security infrastructure, and username/password. A combination of these mechanisms can provide effective secure collaboration capabilities. In this paper, we discuss the requirements of typical collaboratories and some proposals for applying various security mechanisms to collaborative environments