Role-based viewing envelopes for information protection in collaborative modeling

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. Aside from 3D watermarking, research on how to provide IA to distributed collaborative engineering teams is largely non-existent. This paper provides a framework for information assurance within collaborative design, based on a technique we call role-based viewing, in which information security relationships are roles assigned to users based on their permissions and privileges. Role-based viewing is achieved through integration of multi-resolution geometry and with the security model. In this way, 3D models are geometrically partitioned, and the partitioning is used to create multi-resolution mesh hierarchies that obscure, obfuscate, or remove sensitive material from the view of users without appropriate permissions. This approach is the basis for our prototype system FACADE (the Framework for Access-control in Computer-Aided Design Environments), a synchronous, multi-user collaborative modeling environment. In FACADE, groups of users worked in a shared 3D modeling environment in which each user viewing and modeling privileges are managed by a central access control mechanism. In this manner, individual actors see only the data they are allowed to see, at the level of detailed they are permitted to see it.