Multi-session Separation of Duties (MSoD) for RBAC

Abstract

Separation of duties (SoD) is a key security requirement for many business and information systems. Role based access controls (RBAC) is a relatively new paradigm for protecting information systems. In the ANSI standard RBAC model both static and dynamic SoD are defined. However, static SoD policies assume that the system has full control over the assignment of all roles to users, whilst dynamic SoD policies assume that conflicts of interest can only arise during the simultaneous activation of a user's roles. Unfortunately neither of these assumptions hold true in dynamic virtual organisations (VOs), or in business processes that span multiple user sessions, or where users only partially disclose their roles at each session. In this paper we propose multi-session SoD (MSoD) policies for business processes which include multiple tasks enacted by multiple users over many user access control sessions. We explore the means to define MSoD policies in RBAC via multi-session mutually exclusive roles (MMER) and multi-session mutually exclusive privileges (MMEP). We propose an approach to expressing MSoD policies in XML and enforcing MSoD policies in a policy controlled RBAC infrastructure. Finally, we describe how we have implemented MSoD policies in the PERMIS privilege management infrastructure.