User-credential based role mapping in multi-domain environment

Abstract

Collaboration between multiple organizations creates new opportunities for business. With such collaborations becoming a reality, it is necessary to have access control policy integration approach to form a global policy consistent with the partner organizations. Research on policy integration has led to the proposal of several frameworks to uniformly express policies and to integrate such policies. But most of these frameworks are complex, and compromise on the privacy of the constituent domains by sharing all the components of access control policy including Access Control Lists. In this paper, we describe a unique policy integration technique to merge Role Based Access Control (RBAC) policies of multiple domains in heterogeneous environment. The proposed mechanism uses user-credential associated with roles as the main criteria in mapping inter-domain roles. We also show the results of initial prototype of system. Based on the current positive experience, we are investigating on conflict resolution technique that guarantees consistency of the composed policy across all participating domains.