A significant impediment to providing university communities access to sources of published information via the world wide web (WWW) is the lack of access controls and accountability currently provided by web technology. Many publishers would be willing to license data sources to the campus if access were restricted to authorized users only. Similarly, many sources of data on campus that are not currently published electronically could be made available to the entire community if access controls were in place.
This project will provide access control and use logging mechanisms for distributed content delivery based on the world wide web. Security and scalability will be provided by using encryption based authentication mechanisms such as digital certificates. Users will be authenticated based on records appearing in existing campus databases (Information Systems' Community Profile Database and the University Library's Users Database), and will be issued certificates that can be used to gain access to services using a web browser, relatively transparently from the user's perspective.
The work will involve co-designing the system, building the various components, and implementing communications between the parts of the system. Implementation will require setting up a certificate server (possibly commercial), and integration with existing users databases and content servers (web, audio, video, etc.). Components requiring programming include a mechanism for the query server to consult the back-end database, and software in the contents servers to receive and check certificates.
Initially the project will be implemented with a small test set of (real) content, but with a view to scaling up to larger distributed content databases. Interesting issues raised by this project include