Fine-grained and scalable approaches for message integrity

When we have multiple users compiling a single message, including shared contents, metadata, policy, and so on, the integrity of the contents created by individual users needs to be maintained in an effective manner. There is an urgent need for new mechanisms in a trusted content-sharing environment to support multiple signers for the same message, which can be dynamically updated with autonomous protection and maintenance mechanisms. In our previous work we identified and compared three different binding mechanisms including monolithic, autonomous, and chained binding mechanisms, using digital signatures. The original work was designed and implemented for digital certificates. In this paper we apply those schemes with extension to the organization-to-organization messaging services that require effective integrity verification and tracking mechanisms at the user-level in the receiving organization in a scalable manner with fine granularity. We implement our ideas in the Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) platform and discuss the trade-offs of the signature schemes based on our experimental results.