Management of the Access Control for a WebDAV-based Collaborative System

WebDAV is an IETF standard protocol which supports asynchronous collaborative authoring on the Web. The WebDAV Access Control Protocol provides various methods of controlling the resources on a WebDAV server and their properties, helping high-level group activities to be performed through the WebDAV server. In this paper, to provide high level collaboration, we introduce a technique for managing access control over WebDAV resources through the WebDAV Access Control Protocol and describe the development of an access control manager for the CoSlide Collaborative system based on the technique. To provide users with the access control features in an easily understandable manner, the developed technique presents the privileges for performing WebDAV methods instead of the standard privileges in the WebDAV Access Control Protocol. In addition, we present the facility for detecting conflicts between new access privileges on resources and old access privileges on them. We applied the method-based access control management technique to the CoSlide collaborative system. The developed access control manager enables us to create group workspaces with flexible access control strategies for group members and resources.