Research on Distributed Dynamic Trusted Access Control Based on Security Subsystem

Abstract

The flow of data across nodes has become the dominant feature of data sharing in distributed environments with increasingly blurred boundaries, where it is crucial to maintain data access dynamic, trusted, and efficient. However, traditional centralized access control models are not only difficult to apply in distributed environments but also ignore trusted verification of authorized entities. What’s worse, existing access control models rarely consider themselves security, lack independence, at a high risk of being bypassed or tampered with. Thus, we propose in this paper a distributed, dynamic, and trusted access control model, DDTAC-BSS, where the standard Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) architecture is modified and extended. To reduce the attack surface, we separate policy enforcement point (PEP) from other core components, they are located in the node system and access control system, respectively. Then, the access control entry point (ACEP) is added as the only interface for the node system to interact with the access control system. Subsequently, the model introduces the entity trusted assessment mechanism to improve the trustworthiness of access control services. Driven by the dynamic attributes, our model can achieve dynamic trusted authorization and fine-grained access control. Moreover, we implement a lightweight, independent, and distributed security subsystem to achieve unified management of policies and decision-making autonomy by message-driven. By considering the independence of the security subsystem, a trusted operating environment is built based on Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to ensure the security of the access control mechanism itself. The security of our model is proved rigorously based on the non-interference theory. Comprehensive experiments and comparisons have demonstrated the superior functionality, comparable performance, and strong security of our model.