Int J Digit Libr (2004) 4: 137–138 / Digital Object Identifier (DOI) 10.1007/s00799-004-0087-7

Editors’ message for the special issue on security Vijayalakshmi Atluri, Indrakshi Ray Published online: 21 October 2004 –  Springer-Verlag 2004

Recent technological advancements have resulted in phenomenal growth in digital libraries. Often, professionals in the government, military, and commercial sectors make critical decisions based on data obtained from digital libraries. These users rely on the correctness, availability, and secrecy of the data stored in digital libraries. Consequently, security issues are of great concern to both researchers and practitioners involved with digital libraries. A complicating factor is that the technologies that facilitate data management and access introduce new vulnerabilities that can be exploited to damage the digital library system. As a result, the technologies on which digital libraries are based pose new security challenges that must be addressed. Reacting to this increasing need for security, researchers and developers have contributed significantly to advancements in the theory, design, implementation, analysis, and application of secure digital libraries. This special issue on security of the Journal of Digital Libraries provides insights into research activities in this nascent area through six articles selected after a rigorous review process. Due to the large number of submissions and the space limitations associated with a single journal issue, many high-quality papers could not be accepted. The selected papers span a broad range of research themes in this area, such as authorization models and trust negotiation systems, privacy-preservation techniques, and identifying plagiarism through duplicate detection. The following two papers address authorization and access control issues of digital libraries. The paper “An Authorization Model for Multimedia Digital Libraries” by N. Kodali, C. Farkas, and D. Wijesekera presents a generalized authorization model for multimedia digital libraries. Specifically, it shows how different authorization policies and QoS requirements can be represented for

continuous media. The paper “Reasoning with Advanced Policy Rules and Its Application to Access Control” by C. Bettini, S. Jajodia, X.Y. Wang, and D. Wijesekera presents a framework to represent and manage advanced policy rules containing provisions and obligations specified in a collaborative digital library environment. The authors show how provisions and obligations can be formalized in a rule-based policy language and how the system can choose between alternative provisions and obligations. The paper “SemWebDL: A Privacy-Preserving Semantic Web Infrastructure for Digital Libraries” by A. Rezgui, A. Bouguettaya, and M. Eltoweissy discusses how privacy can be preserved in the context of Web-based autonomous, heterogeneous digital libraries. Privacy disclosure becomes even more crucial when we consider the capabilities provided by the Semantic Web. To address this problem, the authors propose a three-tier privacy model, develop an architecture based on this model for Semantic Web digital libraries, and discuss implementation details. The paper “A Trust Negotiation System for Digital Library Web Services” by H. Skogsrud, B. Benatallah, and F. Casati introduces a model-driven trust negotiation framework for Web services and shows how it can be used to handle trust negotiation in digital libraries. Trust negotiations are specified in a state-machine-based model and are subsequently translated into formats that enable automated trust negotiation. This work also describes how dynamic evolution of trust negotiation policies can take place without disrupting the negotiations that are in process. The paper “Selectively Handling Verifiable Digital Content” by L. Bull, D.M. Squire, and Y. Zheng motivates the need to authenticate selective parts of articles obtained from a digital library. The authors address this

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V. Atluri, I. Ray : Editors’ message for the special issue on security

problem by proposing a hierarchical grouping extraction policy that is to be used with content extraction signatures and show how the policy can be implemented using XML signatures. To detect plagiarism in digital documents, F. Mandreoli, R. Martoglia, and P. Tiberio propose techniques that detect similarities between a pair of digital documents in their paper “A Document Comparison Scheme for Secure Duplicate Detection”. In this paper, the authors propose new document similarity measures for

duplicate detection and give data reduction techniques that improve upon the space and time requirements needed for duplicate detection. We would like to thank all the authors for submitting their research results and the reviewers for their insightful reviews. We are grateful for Nabil Adam, editor-in-chief, for his continuous encouragement and help throughout this project. Special mention must also be made of Ahmed Gomaa, Ph.D. student at Rutgers University, for his help with the logistics of putting this issue together.