A flexible context-aware authorization framework for mediation systems

Security is a critical concern for mediator-based data integration among heterogeneous data sources. This paper provides a modeling and architectural solution to the problem of mediation security that addresses the security challenges including context-awareness, semantic heterogeneity, and multiple security policy specification. A generic, extensible modeling method for the security policies in mediation systems is presented. A series of authorization constraints are identified based on the relationship on the different security components in the mediation systems. Moreover, we enforce the flexible access control to mediation systems while providing uniform access for heterogeneous data sources.