Distributed access control for collaborative applications using CRDTs

ABSTRACTDistributed applications are part of our everyday lives, but too often their good operation depends on central servers, all potential points of failure and performance bottlenecks. Designing systems for fully distributed communications however still requires porting common mechanisms needed for feature-rich modern applications such as user rights differentiation, multiple administrators, and end-to-end encryption. We propose a distributed access control mechanism for collaborative applications by relying on conflict-free replicated data types (CRDT), and design an access control policy CRDT able to support Google Docs and POSIX file systems as example of distributed applications. To enforce that policy, we outline a generic data model, examine different conflict resolution strategies at the data and policy levels, and consider a novel approach towards conflicts between data and policy operations.