Role-Based Viewing Envelopes for Information Protection in Collaborative Modeling

摘要

Information security and assurance are new frontiers for collaborative design. In this context, information assurance (IA) refers to methodologies to protect engineering information by ensuring its availability, confidentiality, integrity, nonrepudiation, authentication, and access control. In collaborative design, IA techniques are needed to protect intellectual property, establish security privileges, and create 'need to know' protections for critical features. Aside from 3D watermarking, research on how to provide IA to distributed collaborative engineering teams is largely nonexistent. This paper provides a framework for information assurance within collaborative design that is based on a technique called role-based viewing, in which information security relationships are roles assigned to users based on their permissions and privileges. Role-based viewing is achieved through the integration of multi-resolution geometry with a security model. That is, 3D models are geometrically partitioned, and the partitioning is used to create multi-resolution mesh hierarchies that obscure, obfuscate, or remove sensitive material from the view of users without appropriate permissions. This approach is the basis for the authors' prototype system FACADE (Framework for Access- control in Computer-Aided Design Environments), a synchronous, multi-user collaborative modeling environment. In FACADE, groups of users work in a shared 3D modeling environment in which each user's viewing and modeling privileges are managed by a central access control mechanism. In this manner, individual actors see only the data they are allowed to see, and at the level of detail that they are permitted to see it.