A secure framework for publishing virtual community contracts

The notion of Virtual Community (VC) is today an important paradigm to enable dynamic and large-scale collaboration activities over the web. In many of those activities, security is an important key requirement that to date has not been widely investigated. In this paper, we make a step towards addressing such a problem. We focus on the issue of secure publishing of VC policies because policies represent a key component for any VC. Their security is thus crucial for the proper functioning of the VC. In the paper, after discussing the motivation for the proposed work, we develop protocols for the secure publication of protocols addressing the integrity and confidentiality of the policy publication process. Our protocols cover both community policies and community member local policies. Our approach relies on the use of a system specifically designed for secure and selective dissemination of XML documents. We also provide a sketch of the system implementing the framework and the XML encoding of the documents to be exchanged, and show the computational results of the implemented algorithms.