Role-Based Viewing for Secure Collaborative Modeling

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, non-repudiation, authentication, access control, etc. In collaborative design, IA techniques are needed to protect intellectual property, establish security privileges and create “need to know” protections on critical features. Aside from 3D watermarking, research on how to provide IA to distributed collaborative engineering teams is largely non-existent. This paper provides a framework for information assurance within collaborative design, based on a technique we call role-based viewing. Such role-based viewing is achieved through integration of multi-resolution geometry and security models. 3D models are geometrically partitioned, and the partitioning is used to create multi-resolution mesh hierarchies. Extracting a model suitable for access rights for individual actors within a collaborative design environment is driven by an elaborate access control mechanism.