Extending the Clark-Wilson Security Model for Digital Long-Term Preservation Use-cases

A continuously growing amount of information of today exists not only in digital form but were actually born-digital. These informations need be preserved as they are part of our cultural and scientific heritage or because of legal requirements. As many of these information are born-digital they have no analog origin, and cannot be preserved by traditional means without losing their original representation. Thus digital long-term preservation becomes continuously important and is tackled by several international and national projects like the US National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program [1], the German NESTOR project [2] and the EU FP7 SHAMAN Integrated Project [3]. In digital long-term preservation the integrity and authenticity of the preserved information is of great importance and a challenging task considering the requirement to enforce both security aspects over a long time often assumed to be at least 100 years. Therefore in a previous work [4] we showed the general feasibility of the Clark-Wilson security model [5] for digital long-term preservation in combination with a syntactic and semantic verification approach [6] to tackle these issues. In this work we do a more detailed investigation and show exemplarily the influence of the application of such a security model on the use cases and roles of a digital long-term preservation environment. Our goals is a scalable security model – i.e. no fixed limitations of usable operations, users and objects – for mainly preserving integrity of objects but also ensuring authenticity.