Hierarchical Role-based Viewing for Multi-level Information Security in Collaborative CAD

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. This paper provides a framework for information assurance within collaborative design based on a technique we call Role-based Viewing. We extend upon prior work to present Hierarchical Role-based Viewing as a more flexible and practical approach since role hierarchies naturally reflect an organization’s line of authority and responsibility. We establish a direct correspondence between multi-level security and multiresolution surfaces where a hierarchy is represented as a weighted directed acyclic graph. The permission discovery process is formalized as a graph reachability problem and the path cost is used as input to a multiresolution function. By incorporating security with collaborative design, the costs and risks incurred by multi-organizational collaboration can be reduced. The authors believes that this work is the first of its kind to unite multi-level security and information clouding with geometric data, including multiresolution surfaces, in the fields of computer-aided design and collaborative engineering.