Optimistic access control for distributed collaborative editors

International audienceThe importance of collaborative systems in real-world applications has grown significantly over the recent years. The majority of new applications are designed in a distributed fashion to meet collaborative work requirements. Among these applications, we focus on Distributed Collaborative Editors (DCE) that provide computer support for modifying simultaneously shared documents, such as articles, wiki pages and programming source code by dispersed users. Although such applications are more and more used into many fields, the lack of an adequate access control concept is still limiting their full potential. In fact, controlling access in a decentralized fashion for such systems is still a challenging problem, as they need dynamic access changes and low latency access to shared documents. In this paper, we propose a generic Multi-Administrator Access Control (MAAC) based on replicating the shared document and its authorization policy at the local memory of each user. We consider the propagation of authorizations and their interactions. We propose a generic approach to enforce access control in existing collaborative editing solutions. Finally, we apply our framework on a collaboration prototype and measure its performance in the distributed grid GRID5000 to highlight the scalability of our solutio