XML schema in XML documents with usage control

Abstract

With an increasing amount of semi-structured data, XML has become significant to humans and programs. XML promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is rapidly emerging as a new standard language for semi-structured data representation and exchange on the Internet. XML documents usually contain private information that cannot be shared by all user communities. So securing XML data is becoming increasingly important and several approaches have been designed to protect information in websites. Usage control has been considered as the next generation access control model with distinguishing properties of decision continuity. It has been proven to be efficient to improve security administration with flexible authorization management. Usage control enables finer-grained control over usage of digital objects than that of traditional access control policies and models. XML Schema defines format and contents of XML instance. Access control based on a schema will be transported to all its instances. Also, XML Schema provides a mechanism to build relationships between schemas and elements. In this paper, we present a usage control model to protect information distributed on the web, which allows the access restrictions directly at Schema-level and XML document-level. Finally, comparisons with related works are analysed.