A uniform approach for access control and business models with explicit rule realization

Chapter 23 - Policies, Access Control, and Formal Methods

Radio and television monitoring system is widely adopted by corporations such as transmission monitoring centers and transmitting stations in many provinces. The system is an important technical means to ensure the security of signal transmission and associated facilities. The use privilege management module, an important part of the monitoring system, has significance in protecting the security of transmission and transmitting system of radio and television. However, the problem is that dynamic execution environment constraint and device state constraint have not been considered in authentication and authorization process. In this paper, we introduce a new access control model based on rules constraint especially device status constraint. By establishing custom permission described statements, it can accurately describe fine-grained permission. The simple implementation of the authorization management module is given in the paper.

With the increasingly strict requirement for computer system security, access control models have become more complex. Existing models, such as discretionary access control (DAC) model, mandatory access control (MAC) model, role based access control (RBAC) model, and attribute based access control (ABAC) model, all have advantages and disadvantages regarding practicability and security. In addition, there is an inherent security risk in these access control models. The models merely control the access permission, but ignore the verification for the identity credibility of the entities involved in the access. With the proposal of trusted computing and the application of trusted platform, it is possible to implement, on stand-alone computers, the verification of identity credibility for the entities involved in the access. In this paper, we analyze the authorization and access decision policy of the RBAC model and the ABAC model. The characteristics of the trusted computing, which can ensure the identity credibility of the entities involved in the access, is also considered. Based on the above analysis, we establish a trusted computing based enhanced access control (TCBEAC) model, which can be deployed on stand-alone computers for common users.

Access to resources can take many forms: digital access via an onsite network, through an external site, website, etc., or physical access to labs, machines, information repositories, etc. Whether access to resources is digital or physical, it must be allowed, denied, revoked, or disabled using robust and coherent access control (AC) models. What makes the process of AC more complicated is the emergence of digital transformation technologies and pervasive systems such as the internet of things (IoT) and industry 4.0 systems, especially with the growing demand for transparency in users’ interaction with various applications and services. Controlling access and ensuring security and cybersecurity in IoT and industry 4.0 environments is a challenging task. This is due to the increasing distribution of resources and the massive presence of cyber-threats and cyber-attacks. To ensure the security and privacy of users in industry sectors, we need an advanced AC metamodel that defines all the required components and attributes to derive various instances of AC models and follow the new and increasing demand for AC requirements due to continuous technology upgrades. Due to the several limitations in the existing metamodels and their inability to answer the current AC requirements, we have developed a Hierarchical, Extensible, Advanced, Dynamic (HEAD) AC metamodel with significant features that overcome the existing metamodels’ limitations. In this paper, the HEAD metamodel is employed to specify the needed AC policies for two case studies inspired by the computing environment of Institut Technologique de Maintenance Industrielle (ITMI)-Sept-Îles, QC, Canada; the first is for ITMI’s local (non-IoT) environment and the second for ITMI’s IoT environment. For each case study, the required AC model is derived using the domain-specific language (DSL) of HEAD metamodel, then Xtend notation (an expressive dialect of Java) is utilized to generate the needed Java code which represents the concrete instance of the derived AC model. At the system level, to get the needed AC rules, Cypher statements are generated and then injected into the Neo4j database to represent the Next Generation Access Control (NGAC) policy as a graph. NGAC framework is used as an enforcement point for the rules generated by each case study. The results show that the HEAD metamodel can be adapted and integrated into various local and distributed environments. It can serve as a unified framework, answer current AC requirements and follow policy upgrades. To demonstrate that the HEAD metamodel can be implemented on other platforms, we implement an administrator panel using VB.NET and SQL.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted much interest in the research community because of their wide range of applications. An emerging application for WSNs involves their use in healthcare where they are generally termed wireless medical sensor networks. In a hospital, outfitting every patient with tiny, wearable, wireless vital sign sensors would allow doctors, nurses, and other caregivers to continuously monitor the state of their patients. In such a scenario, patients are expected to be treated in reasonable time, so an access control model is needed, which will provide both real-time access to comprehensive medical records and detect unauthorized access to sensitive data. In emergency situations, a doctor or nurse needs to access data immediately. The loss in data availability can result in further decline in the patient's condition or can even lead to death. Therefore, the availability of data is more important than any security concern in emergency situations. To address that research issue for medical data in WSNs, we propose the break-the-glass access control (BTG-AC) model that is a modified and redesigned version of the break-the-glass role-based access control (BTG-RBAC) model to address data availability issue and to detect the security policy violations from both authorized and unauthorized users. Several changes within the access control engine are made in BTG-RBAC in order to make the new BTG-AC to apply and fit in WSNs. This paper presents the detailed design and development of the BTG-AC model based on a healthcare scenario. The evaluation results show that the concepts of BTG, prevention and detection mechanism, and obligation provide more flexible access than other current access control models in WSNs. Additionally, we compare the BTG-AC model with an adaptive access control (A2C) model, which has similar properties, for further evaluation. Alongside with the comparison, the advantages and disadvantages of BTG-AC over current WSN access control models are presented.

In dynamic e-business and e-manufacturing environments, enterprises require a secure access control mechanism based on an access control model to manage employee authorisations flexibly. This study presents an organisation structure-based access control (OSAC) model based on a task-role-based access control (T-RBAC) model. The OSAC model emphasises that employee authorisations are generated directly based on their position in the enterprise organisational structure. The proposed model extends the concepts of static separation of duty (SSD), dynamic separation of duty (DSD), prerequisite, and cardinality constraints in the role-based access control (RBAC) model to present department and role relations that identify the cooperative interactive relations among roles across department boundaries to facilitate resource sharing among roles and simplify enterprise resource management. Various relations and applied examples are demonstrated using the class model in unified modelling language (UML). Examples of inappropriate use of relations that lead to violation of relation are also presented. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model for most businesses, a case study involving an automobile component producer is presented and an OSAC model-based administrative management system is developed to ensure that appropriate resources can be legally used by the correct employees and at the right time. By applying the proposed model, administrators can easily manage resources based on an organisational structure perspective and the resource sharing capabilities of all departments can be improved.

Combining the role-based access control (RBAC) model with the attribute-based access control (ABAC) model is a popular direction of current research on access control models. At present, many RABAC (RBAC + ABAC) models have been proposed. On the basis of RBAC model, these models dynamically apply ABAC rules to user-role mapping, role-permission mapping and user-permission mapping, thus realizing the usability and flexibility of access control models to some extent. But these models still have some insufficiencies in access control granularity and flexibility. This paper analyzes the defects of existing RABAC models and their causes, proposes a more fine-grained, flexible and efficient RABAC model, and realizes an access control system based on this model. Through the well-designed ABAC rules and their application modes, the system has achieved the goal of the RABAC model proposed by this paper and facilitated the administrator's management of access control rules.

Web applications manage increasingly large amounts of sensitive information and often need to implement access control (AC) models. However, documentation about the implemented AC model is often sparse and few, if no tool exists to support AC model investigation. Based on the results of a previous study, we show how formal concept analysis (FCA) can support the understanding and visualization of reverse-engineered AC models. Results of applying FCA to Moodle, a medium-sized (625 473 LOC) Web application, are presented and discussed. We show how FCA enhances the overall comprehension of reverse-engineered AC models and sheds light on previously unknown features of Moodle's AC model.

Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing and enhancing the quality of human lives in every aspect. With a disruption of IoT devices and applications, attackers are leveraging weak authentication and access control mechanisms on these IoT devices and applications to gain unauthorized access on user devices and data and cause them harm. Access control is a critical security mechanism to secure the IoT ecosystem which comprises cloud computing and edge computing services along with smart devices. Today major cloud and IoT service providers including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Azure utilize some customized forms of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model along with specific authorization policies enabled by policy-based access control models. To enable fine-grained access control and overcome limitations of existing access control models, there is an imminent need to develop a flexible and dynamic access control model for securing smart devices, data and resources in the cloud-enabled IoT architecture. In this paper, we develop a formal attribute-based access control (ABAC) model for AWS IoT by building upon and extending previously developed access control model for AWS IoT, known as AWS-IoTAC model. We demonstrate the applicability of our proposed model through an industrial IoT use case and its implementation in the AWS IoT platform. Our proposed fine grained model for AWS IoT incorporates its existing capabilities and introduces new attributes for IoT entities and attribute-based policies for enabling expressive access control in AWS IoT. We also evaluate the performance of our model on the AWS cloud and IoT platform with the future smart industries use-case to depict the feasibility of our model in a real-world platform.

\nAs the development of computer science and smart health-care technology, there is a trend for patients to enjoy medical care at home. Taking enormous users in the Smart Health-care System into consideration, access control is an important issue. Traditional access control models, discretionary access control, mandatory access control, and role-based access control, do not properly reflect the characteristics of Smart Health-care System. This paper proposes an advanced access control model for the medical health-care environment, task-role-based access control model, which overcomes the disadvantages of traditional access control models. The task-role-based access control (T-RBAC) model introduces a task concept, dividing tasks into four categories. It also supports supervision role hierarchy. T-RBAC is a proper access control model for Smart Health-care System, and it improves the management of access rights. This paper also proposes an implementation of T-RBAC, a binary two-key-lock pair access control scheme using prime factorization.\n

Access control systems are among the most critical of computer security components. Faulty policies, misconfigurations, or flaws in software implementations can result in serious vulnerabilities. To formally and precisely capture the security properties that access control should adhere to, access control models are usually written, bridging the gap in abstraction between policies and mechanisms. Identifying discrepancies between policy specifications and their intended function is crucial because correct implementation and enforcement of policies by applications is based on the premise that the policy specifications are correct. As a result, policy specifications represented by models must undergo rigorous verification and validation through systematic verification and testing to ensure that the policy specifications truly encapsulate the desires of the policy authors. Verifying the conformance of access control policies and models is a non-trivial and critical task, and one important aspect of such verification is to formally check the inconsistency and incompleteness of the model and safety requirements of the policy, because an access control model and its implementation do not necessarily explicitly express the policy, which can also be implicitly embedded by mixing with direct access constraints or other access control models.

Access control defines what users can perform within a system. It is usually defined by software engineers and end users are seldom asked for cooperation. The main objective of this paper is to gather the necessary knowledge from the end users of an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) regarding access control and, with their collaboration, define a list of usable access control rules and access control model, which are closer to user needs and workflows. Access control standards in healthcare were also analyzed. Afterwards, focus groups were applied to health professionals and several access control rules were extracted from the analysis of all the information that was gathered. The Break The Glass — Role Based Access Control model (BTG-RBAC) was created and includes the generated access control rules, which are closer to users' workflows and needs and can, therefore, improve EMR's usability while reducing some barriers for its effective integration.

Access control is one of the techniques to provide accessibility, flexibility and control over the cloud resources. The traditional access control model is no longer sufficient to provide protection of data. Due to the rising data breaches, it is important to evolve our data security mechanisms. Therefore, it is better to combine several techniques to bring out the most efficient technique. Thus, this paper introduces custom access control model where Role- Based Access Control (RBAC) model and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) model is combined to give a single hybrid model. This technique brings out the best qualities of both models. It provides both flexibility and dynamicity. The assignment of attributes provides better security. Key Words: Access Control, Role-Based Access Control, Attribute-Based Access Control, Cloud Computing

Granting users precise access rights is one of the purposes of access control technologies. With the increasing requirements of fine-grained authorization, too strict or too loose access control models may cause many problems. In this paper, aiming at insufficient authorizations in text databases, we propose a risk-aware topic-based access control (RTBAC) model, which uses topics to represent the content relationships between users and data. The RTBAC model also uses risk technologies to grant users corresponding access rights based on their historical behaviours and their access requests. The RTBAC model is a fine-grained access control model, and the authorization of RTBAC can reach the paragraph level. Experimental results show that RTBAC is an efficient access control model and the access control granularity of the RTBAC model is more than 3 times that of the existing content-based access control models.

Despite the widespread adoption of Role-based Access Control (RBAC) models, new access control models are required for new applications for which RBAC may not be especially well suited and for which implementations of RBAC do not enable properties of access control policies to be adequately defined and proven. To address these issues, we propose a form of access control model that is based upon the key notion of an event. The access control model that we propose is intended to permit the representation of access control requirements in a distributed and changing computing environment, the proving of properties of access control policies defined in terms of our model, and direct implementations for access control checking.