Abstract:Joint access to shared resources (e.g., objects, applications, and services) among autonomous domains that form a coalition has recently become important in both military and commercial areas. The brass tacks in coalition are that these domains have different self-interests although they focus on achieving a common goal. In this paper, to enable effective protection of jointly-owned resources, the notion of trust into coalition access control is built, and a fine-grained access control policy based on quantifying permission idea is proposed. The usage format of permission in this policy is meta-permission that is a share of access permission to coalition resources and is owned by multiple domain users. When accessing jointly owned resources, the sum of participants'meta-permission value must attain a predefined permission quantity called "permission-threshold" and an assigned participant member number. In addition, permissible time span of the meta-permission is also taken into account to achieve the above goals and access requesting time must fall into their common permissible time span. Doing this enables the coalition to retain control over the access to coalition resources in distributed environments. Lastly, the preserving security property of the fine-grained access control policy with respect to state transition is proven.