Towards a Fine-Grained Access Control Mechanism for Privacy Protection and Policy Conflict Resolution

Abstract

Access control is a security technique that specifies access rights to resources in a computing environment. As information systems nowadays become more complex, it plays an important role in authenticating and authorizing users and preventing an attacker from targeting sensitive information. However, no proper consideration has been fully investigated so far in privacy protection. While many studies have acknowledged this issue, recent studies have not provided a fine-grained access control system for data privacy protection. As the data set becomes larger, we have to confront more privacy challenges. For example, the access control mechanism must be able to guarantee fine-grained access control, privacy protection, conflicts and redundancies between rules of the same policy or between different policies. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework for enforcing attribute-based security policies stored in the JSON document together with the feature of data privacy protection and incorporates a policy structure based on the prioritization of functions to resolve conflicts at a fine-grained level called “Privacy aware access control model for policy conflict resolution”. We also use Polish notation for modeling condi-tional expressions which are the combination of subject, action, resource, and environment attributes so that privacy policies are flexible, dynamic and fine-grained. Experiments are carried out to two aspects (i) illustrate the relationship between the processing time for access decision and the complexity of policies;(ii) illustrate the relationship between the processing time for the traditional approach (single policy, multi-policy without priority) and our approach (multi-policy with priority). Experimental results show that the evaluation performance satisfies the privacy requirements defined by the user.