Negotiating Access Control Policies Between Autonomous Domains

Abstract

Autonomous policy domains often need to share resources to accomplish a common task. To do this they must negotiate a common access control policy to the shared resources. We use mathematical techniques from game theory to show that the outcome of such negotiations can often be predicted from the distribution of power among the participants, independent of the actual mechanics of negotiation. We discuss the axiomatic derivation of some game theoretic solution concepts, and illustrate our techniques with examples.