Assessment Framework for the Identification and Evaluation of Main Features for Distributed Usage Control Solutions

Data exchange between organizations is becoming an increasingly significant issue due to the great opportunities it presents. However, there is great reluctance to share if data sovereignty is not provided. Providing it calls for not only access control but also usage control implemented in distributed systems. Access control is a research field where there has been a great deal of work, but usage control, especially implemented in distributed systems as Distributed Usage Control (DUC), is a very new field of research that presents great challenges. Moreover, little is known about what challenges must really be faced and how they must be addressed. This is evidenced by the fact that existing research has focused non-specifically on different features of DUC, which are not formalized. Therefore, the path for the development of DUC solutions is unclear and it is difficult to analyze the scope of data sovereignty attained by the wide range of DUC solutions. In this context, this article is based on an initial in-depth analysis of DUC related work. In it, the challenges posed by DUC in terms of data sovereignty and the features that must be provided to address them are identified and analyzed for the first time. Based on these features, an initial DUC framework is proposed to assess in a practical and unified way the extent to which DUC solutions provide data sovereignty. Finally, the assessment framework is applied to compare the scopes of the most widespread DUC solutions and identify their limitations.