Object-Specific Role-Based Access Control

Abstract

The proper management of privacy and security constraints in information systems in general and access control in particular constitutes a tremendous, but still prevalent challenge. Role-based access control (RBAC) and its variations can be considered as the widely adopted approach to realize authorization in information systems. However, RBAC lacks a proper object-specific support, which disallows establishing the fine-grained access control required in many domains. By comparison, attribute-based access control (ABAC) enables a fine-grained access control based on policies and rules evaluating attributes. As a drawback, ABAC lacks the abstraction of roles. Moreover, it is challenging to engineer and to audit the granted privileges encoded in rule-based policies. This paper presents the generic approach of object-specific role-based access control (ORAC). On one hand, ORAC enables information system engineers, administrators and users to utilize the well-known principle of roles. On the other hand, ORAC allows realizing the access to objects in a fine-grained way where required. The approach was systematically established according to well-elicited key requirements for fine-grained access control in information systems. For the purpose of evaluation, the approach was applied to real-world scenarios and implemented in a proof-of-concept prototype demonstrating its feasibility and applicability.