Mining Relationship-Based Access Control Policies from Incomplete and Noisy Data

Abstract

Relationship-based access control (ReBAC) extends attribute-based access control (ABAC) to allow policies to be expressed in terms of chains of relationships between entities. ReBAC policy mining algorithms have potential to significantly reduce the cost of migration from legacy access control systems to ReBAC, by partially automating the development of a ReBAC policy. This paper presents algorithms for mining ReBAC policies from information about entitlements together with information about entities. It presents the first such algorithms designed to handle incomplete information about entitlements, typically obtained from operation logs, and noise (errors) in information about entitlements. We present two algorithms: a greedy search guided by heuristics, and an evolutionary algorithm. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithms on several policies, including 3 large case studies.