Adventures in the Analysis of Access Control Policies

Abstract

Access Control is becoming increasingly important for today’s ubiquitous systems which provide mechanism to prevent sensitive resources against unauthorized users. In access control models, the administration of access control policies is an important task that raises a crucial analysis problem: if a set of administrators can give a user an unauthorized access permission. In this paper, we consider the analysis problem in the context of the Administrative Role-Based Access Control (ARBAC), one of the most widespread administrative models. We describe how we design heuristics to enable an analysis tool, called asaspXL, to scale up to handle large and complex ARBAC policies and a sequence of analysis problems. An extensive experimentation shows that the proposed heuristics play a key role in the success of the analysis tool over the state-of-the-art analysis tools.