The Privilege Management and Enforcement System (PMES)

PMES is a distributed resource-sharing environment that provides privilege management and enforcement features. It is an enabler for effective collaboration between autonomous organizations that wish to work as one. Although existing business-to-business (B2B) applications and services can address some of the needs of such businesses, they do not currently provide a sufficiently secure or scalable environment for dynamic, internet-based collaboration. PMES allows seamless integration of dynamically allocable resources across multiple organizations and through multiple access methods. It facilitates flexible yet secure protocols for allocating resource privileges within and between enterprises. And it provides powerful administrative and management tools via a web-based interface. Privilege and enforcement options include user and group rights (read, write, change, execute, admin), time-based access, and interdependency and/or mutual exclusion. Users can also delegate privilege management to another enterprise when the local network is unavailable. Resource rights are strictly enforced, security rules are applied to provide early warning of potential security problems, and all unauthorized access attempts are logged. In general, users for this system will include managers, employees, business partners, associates, contractors, and system administrators for enterprise businesses utilizing the Internet. Specifically, users will include people who are required to gather information before conducting business transactions, or manage business on local or remote sites. Users must be capable of connecting to the Internet via computer terminal, laptop, or wireless handheld device.