6th European Conference - Academic Conferences

Maria Semmelrock-Picej et al.
they are concerned about possible undesirable economic consequences resulting from a misuse of
such information. Indeed, many companies express concern about the privacy and identity
management and research suggests that identity management is of focal concern to companies.
Identity Management is a hot area, experiencing considerable growth and gets more and more one of
the challenging key disciplines an IT department of a midsize to large enterprise has to ise (Jackson
2010). It is not surprising because organizations, supply chains and customers have been tightly
connected together in digital networked economy. Another important aspect is that of identity theft
and misuse, leading to serious damages within enterprises and also in the Internet development.
The major contribution of this paper is in revealing and discussing the identitiy federation approach
that impact trust in collaborative environments. In doing so, this paper shows, based on the
standardized Shibboleth protocol, how the identity data of a company can be integrated, when taking
part in collaborations. The second contribution of this paper is in identifying the requirements of
smallest companies in this field. When talking about these issues in an enterprise context mostly midsize
to large enterprises are in the focus of consideration. This paper presents solutions which bridge
this gap by offering the necessary functionality also to smallest companies. These findings should
enhance very small companies to also start collaborating virtually.
2. The SPIKE project
2.1 Introduction
SPIKE as a virtual infrastructure aims at researching and implementing a virtual collaboration
platform. In order to reach these goals SPIKE’s security infrastructure is highly reliable and adaptive
and consists of the following layers (see next figure), (Semmelrock-Picej and Possegger 2010):
A: Network Enterprise Layer – at level A different companies offer their particular tacit and explicit
knowledge, expertise, resources and skills. All involved companies are characterized by a number
of criteria like strategic position, size of company, market, location, and so on.
B: Conceptual SPIKE Layer: The Service Mediatior of this layer combines all provided tangible
and intangible resources and coordinats them accordingly to the requirements of the market
which than form a new product (see figure 1 B).
Level B also consists of mapping instruments to assign involved companies and their services and
capabilities to the tasks of the business process. This layer particularly supports the selection,
orchestration, management and execution several kinds of services in a controlled way.
2.2 Security functions in SPIKE
In participating the SPIKE platform companies/users first name their identity. The system validates the
user’s claimed identity (authentication). Both steps precede access control which aims at preventing
unauthorized use of a resource as well as use of resources in an unauthorized way.
As identities in virtual cooperations are not anonymous trust and reputation mechanisms are the key
to success of open, dynamic and service oriented virtual collaborations as they lead to social trust of
involved persons in virtual cooperations and are therefore the best strategy to ensure virtual
cooperation. However, this trust is based on repeated interactions wich can be successful or fail.
Therefore a key aspect of our approach is the permanent process of the analysis and evaluation of
interactions which automatically determine trust.
In the last years trust has mostly been connected and analysed in combination with technical security
issues. Based on this several definitions has been developed (Josang, Ismail and Boyd 2007; Artz
and Gil 2007). For our discussion we understand trust more human centric which relies on previous
interactions and improves human collaboration supported with technical systems in a virtual environment.
For this communication is the basis for directly influencing trust between individuals in business
collaborations (Economist 2008) and relies on the experiences of previous interactions (Billhardt,
Hermoso, Ossowski and Centeno 2007; Mui, Mohtashemi and Helberstadt 2002) and the similarity of
interests and skills (Matsuo and Yamamoto 2009). In addition especially in social networks and
collaborations trust is strongly related to information disclosure, identity management and privacy and
can also be used as a basic model to improve document recommendations to better match interests
of users.
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