Administrative Role-Based Access Control Research Articles

Automated Analysis of Access Control Policies Based on Model Checking

Access control is becoming increasingly important for today’s ubiquitous systems which provide mechanism to prevent sensitive resources against unauthorized users. In access control models, the administration of access control policies is a task of paramount importance for distributed systems. A crucial analysis problem is to foresee if a set of administrators can give a user an unauthorized access permission. In this paper, we consider the analysis problem in the context of the administrative role-based access control (ARBAC) and its extension, the administrative temporal role-based access control (ATRBAC). More details, we present how to design analysis techniques, namely asasp2.1 and asaspTIME2.0 for ARBAC and ATRBAC, respectively, which are based on the ideas of a framework to analyze infinite state-transition systems. Moreover, we describe how we design heuristics to enable the analysis techniques to scale up to handle large and complex authorization policies. An extensive experimentation shows that the proposed techniques are scalability and the heuristics play a key role in the success of the analysis tools over well-known analysis techniques.

Automated and efficient analysis of administrative temporal RBAC policies with role hierarchies

Automated and efficient analysis of administrative temporal RBAC policies with role hierarchies

Tenant-based access control model for multi-tenancy and sub-tenancy architecture in Software-as-a-Service

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) introduces multi-tenancy architecture (MTA). Sub-tenancy architecture (STA), is an extension of MTA, allows tenants to offer services for subtenant developers to customize their applications in the SaaS infrastructure. In a STA system, tenants can create subtenants, and grant their resources (including private services and data) to their subtenants. The isolation and sharing relations between parent-child tenants, sibling tenants or two non-related tenants are more complicated than those between tenants in MTA. It is important to keep service components or data private, and at the same time, allow them to be shared, and support application customizations for tenants. To address this problem, this paper provides a formal definition of a new tenant-based access control model based on administrative role-based access control (ARBAC) for MTA and STA in service-oriented SaaS (called TMS-ARBAC). Autonomous areas (AA) and AA-tree are proposed to describe the autonomy of tenants, including their isolation and sharing relationships. Authorization operations on AA and different resource sharing strategies are defined to create and deploy the access control scheme in STA models. TMS-ARBAC model is applied to design a geographic e-Science platform.

Autonomous Decentralized Authorization and Authentication Management for Hierarchical Multi-Tenancy

SUMMARY Hierarchical multi-tenancy, which enables tenants to be divided into subtenants, is a flexible and scalable architecture for representing subsets of users and application resources in the real world. However, the resource isolation and sharing relations for tenants with hierarchies are more complicated than those between tenants in the flat Multi-Tenancy Architecture. In this paper, a hierarchical tenant-based access control model based on Administrative Role-Based Access Control in Softwareas-a-Service is proposed. Autonomous Areas and AA-tree are used to describe the autonomy and hierarchy of tenants, including their isolation and sharing relationships. AA is also used as an autonomous unit to create and deploy the access permissions for tenants. Autonomous decentralized authorization and authentication schemes for hierarchical multi-tenancy are given out to help different level tenants to customize efficient authority and authorization in large-scale SaaS systems.

Policy analysis for administrative role based access control without separate administration

Role based access control (RBAC) is a widely used approach to access control with well-known advantages in managing authorization policies. This paper considers user-role reachability analysis of administrative role based access control (ARBAC), which defines administrative roles and specifies how members of each administrative role can change the RBAC policy. Most existing works on user-role reachability analysis assume the separate administration restriction in ARBAC policies. While this restriction greatly simplifies the user-role reachability analysis, it also limits the expressiveness and applicability of ARBAC. In this paper, we consider analysis of ARBAC without the separate administration restriction and present new techniques to reduce the number of ARBAC rules and users considered during analysis. We also present parallel algorithms that speed up the analysis on multi-core systems. The experimental results show that our techniques significantly reduce the analysis time, making it practical to analyze ARBAC without separate administration.

Policy analysis for administrative role based access control without separate administration

Role based access control RBAC is a widely used approach to access control with well-known advantages in managing authorization policies. This paper considers user-role reachability analysis of adm...

AMTRAC: An administrative model for temporal role-based access control

Over the years, Role Based Access Control (RBAC) has received significant attention in system security and administration. The Temporal Role Based Access Control (TRBAC) model is an extension of RBAC that allows one to specify periodic enabling and disabling of roles in a role enabling base (REB). While decentralized administration and delegation of administrative responsibilities in large RBAC systems is managed using an administrative role based access control model like ARBAC97, no administrative model for TRBAC has yet been proposed. In this paper, we introduce such a model and name it AMTRAC (Administrative Model for Temporal Role based Access Control). AMTRAC defines a broad range of relations that control user-role assignment, role-permission assignment, role–role assignment and role enabling base assignment. Since the first three are similar to those in ARBAC97, the role enabling base assignment component has been discussed in detail in this paper. The different ways by which role enabling conditions of regular roles can be modified are first explained. We then show how to specify which of the administrative roles are authorized to modify the role enabling conditions of any regular role. An exhaustive set of commands for authorization enforcement along with their pre and postconditions is also presented. Together, this would facilitate practical deployment and security analysis of TRBAC systems.

Mohawk

Verifying that access-control systems maintain desired security properties is recognized as an important problem in security. Enterprise access-control systems have grown to protect tens of thousands of resources, and there is a need for verification to scale commensurately. We present techniques for abstraction-refinement and bound-estimation for bounded model checkers to automatically find errors in Administrative Role-Based Access Control (ARBAC) security policies. ARBAC is the first and most comprehensive administrative scheme for Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) systems. In the abstraction-refinement portion of our approach, we identify and discard roles that are unlikely to be relevant to the verification question (the abstraction step). We then restore such abstracted roles incrementally (the refinement steps). In the bound-estimation portion of our approach, we lower the estimate of the diameter of the reachability graph from the worst-case by recognizing relationships between roles and state-change rules. Our techniques complement one another, and are used with conventional bounded model checking. Our approach is sound and complete: an error is found if and only if it exists. We have implemented our technique in an access-control policy analysis tool called Mohawk . We show empirically that Mohawk scales well to realistic policies, and provide a comparison with prior tools.

An Audit-Integrated ARBAC Model

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model is the main-stream access control model. When addressing large-scale and distributed application, the highest Security Administrator(SA) of RBAC model always try to transfer his management authority to his inferior SAs to decrease his workload. However, How to ensure that these inferior SAs perform their management authorities legally is a big problem. Although there are a technology framework of administrative RBAC model, named ARBAC97, the supervise mechanism and audit mechanism on the utilization of transferred authorities is incomplete in RBAC model. In this research, an audit-integrated ARBAC (au-ARBAC) model is presented. In the au-ARBAC model, a right and liability mechanism has been set up, an audit role is defined and auditing permission is assigned to this role. At the same time, we put forwards two types basic audit business: routine audit and accident audit. As to accident audit, a decision process for division of responsibility is designed to clarify the responsibility of wrongdoer SAs. The Au-ARBAC model can help to improve the Consciousness of authorization responsibility and to perform their management authorities responsibly and legally.

Scalable automated symbolic analysis of administrative role-based access control policies by SMT solving1

Administrative Role Based Access Control ARBAC is one of the most widespread framework for the management of access-control policies. Several automated analysis techniques have been proposed to help maintaining desirable security properties of ARBAC policies. One of the main limitation of available analysis techniques is that the set of users is bounded. In this paper, we propose a symbolic framework to overcome this limitation. We design an automated analysis technique that can handle both a bounded and an unbounded number of users by adapting recent methods for the symbolic model checking of infinite state systems that use first-order logic and SMT solving techniques. An extensive experimental evaluation confirms the scalability of the proposed technique.

Runtime Administration of an RBAC Profile for XACML

The eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) is the de facto language to specify access control policies for web services. XACML has an RBAC profile (XACML-RBAC) to support role-based access control policies. We extend this profile with an administrative RBAC profile, which we refer to as the XACML-ARBAC profile. One of the advantages of doing so is to use policies based on RBAC model to administrate XACML-RBAC policies. Because using permissions granted by XACML-ARBAC policies alter XACML-RBAC policies, enforcing XACML-ARBAC polices requires some concurrency control within XACML access controller's runtime. In order to solve this concurrency problem, we propose a session-aware administrative model for RBAC, and enhance the XACML policy evaluation runtime using a locking mechanism. Experimental study shows reconcilable performance characteristics of our enhancements to Sun's XACML reference implementation.

Policy analysis for Administrative Role-Based Access Control

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is a widely used model for expressing access control policies. In large organizations, the RBAC policy may be collectively managed by many administrators. Administrative RBAC (ARBAC) models express the authority of administrators, thereby specifying how an organization’s RBAC policy may change. Changes by one administrator may interact in unintended ways with changes by other administrators. Consequently, the effect of an ARBAC policy is hard to understand by simple inspection. In this paper, we consider the problem of analyzing ARBAC policies. Specifically, we consider reachability properties (e.g., whether a user can eventually be assigned to a role by a group of administrators), availability properties (e.g., whether a user cannot be removed from a role by a group of administrators), containment properties (e.g., every member of one role is also a member of another role) satisfied by a policy, and information flow properties. We show that reachability analysis for ARBAC is PSPACE-complete. We also give algorithms and complexity results for reachability and related analysis problems for several categories of ARBAC policies, defined by simple restrictions on the policy language. Some of these results are based on the connection we establish between security policy analysis and planning problems in Artificial Intelligence.

Symbolic reachability analysis for parameterized administrative role-based access control

Role-based access control (RBAC) is a widely used access control paradigm. In large organizations, the RBAC policy is managed by multiple administrators. An administrative role-based access control (ARBAC) policy specifies how each administrator may change the RBAC policy. It is often difficult to fully understand the effect of an ARBAC policy by simple inspection, because sequences of changes by different administrators may interact in unexpected ways. ARBAC policy analysis algorithms can help by answering questions, such as user-role reachability, which asks whether a given user can be assigned to given roles by given administrators. Allowing roles and permissions to have parameters significantly enhances the scalability, flexibility, and expressiveness of ARBAC policies. This paper defines PARBAC, which extends the classic ARBAC97 model to support parameters, proves that user-role reachability analysis for PARBAC is undecidable when parameters may range over infinite types, and presents a semi-decision procedure for reachability analysis of PARBAC. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first analysis algorithm specifically for parameterized ARBAC policies. We evaluate its efficiency by analyzing its parameterized complexity and benchmarking it on case studies and synthetic policies. We also experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of several optimizations.

Supporting dynamic administration of RBAC in web-based collaborative applications during run-time

The requirements for the efficient management of authorisations in web-based collaborative applications lead to new access control administration paradigms during run-time. The need for fine-grained and just-in-time access control can effectively be addressed by dynamic administration of authorisations, via either proper role or permission activation. In this paper, an authorisation architecture that is based on the Dynamically Administering Role-based Access Control (DARBAC) model, and provides access control and meta-access control capabilities, is presented. The paper describes the implementation of the components and the structure of the architecture within the.NET framework. The application of the implemented access control system is also demonstrated. Based on the results of this demonstration, a more detailed investigation of the benefits of the proposed approach, which are related to improvements in the administration of Role-based Access Control (RBAC) during run-time, is presented.

An effective role administration model using organization structure

Role-based access control (RBAC) is a well-accepted model for access control in an enterprise environment. When we apply RBAC model to large enterprises, effective role administration is a major issue. ARBAC97 is a well-known solution for decentralized RBAC administration. ARBAC97 authorizes administrative roles by means of role ranges and prerequisite conditions, where prerequisite conditions effectively work as a restricted pool for administrative roles to pick users or permissions. Although attractive and elegant in their own right, these mechanisms have significant shortcomings. In this paper, we propose an improved role administration model named ARBAC02 to overcome the weaknesses of ARBAC97. ARBAC02 introduces the concept of organization structure for defining user and permission pools independent of roles and role hierarchies, with a refined prerequisite condition specification. In addition, we present a bottom-up approach of permission-role administration in contrast to the top-down approach in ARBAC97. As a general solution, we illustrate the applications of organization structured-based security administration with other access control models, such as access control list model and lattice-based access control model.

효과적인 역할계층 관리를 위한 기본 무결성 규칙

ARBAC(adminstrative role-based access control)은 다수의 보안 관리자에 의한 분산 권한관리를 위한 대표적인 보안 모델이다. 각각의 보안 관리자는 역할계층 내에서 자신의 권한 관리 영역을 지정 받는다. ARBAC 모델의 문제중의 하나는 역할계층에 대한 합법적인 변경행위가 불법적 정보 흐름과 같은 원하지 않는 결과를 가져올 수 있다는 점이다. 이를 방지하기 위해 ARBAC 모델의 일부인 RRA97 모델에서는 역할 계층의 기하학적 구조에 기초한 복잡한 제약조건을 제시하고 있다. 본 논문에서는 집합론에 기초한 단일 무결성 규칙을 제안한다. 이 규칙은 단순하고 직관적이며, RRA97 모델의 모든 제약조건을 대체할 수 있다. Administrative Role-Based Access Control(ARBAC) is a typical model for decentralized authority management by plural security administrators. They have their work range on the role hierarchy. A problem is that legal modification of role hierarch may induce unexpected side effect. Role-Role Assignment 97(RRA97) model introduced some complex integrity principles to prevent the unexpected side effect based on geometric approach. We introduce simple and new one integrity principle based on simple set theory. It is simple and intuitive. It can substitute for all integrity principles of RRA97 model.

X-gtrbac admin

The modern enterprise spans several functional units or administrative domains with diverse authorization requirements. Access control policies in an enterprise environment typically express these requirements as authorization constraints. While desirable for access control, constraints can lead to conflicts in the overall policy in a multidomain environment. The administration problem for enterprise-wide access control, therefore, not only includes authorization management for users and resources within a single domain but also conflict resolution among heterogeneous access control policies of multiple domains to allow secure interoperation within the enterprise. This work presents design and implementation of X-GTRBAC Admin, an administration model that aims at enabling administration of role-based access control (RBAC) policies in the presence of constraints with support for conflict resolution in a multidomain environment. A key feature of the model is that it allows decentralization of policy administration tasks through the abstraction of administrative domains, which not only simplifies authorization management, but is also fundamental to the concept of decentralized conflict resolution presented. The paper also illustrates the applicability of the outlined administrative concepts in a realistic enterprise environment using an implementation prototype that facilitates policy administration in large enterprises.

Research and Implementation of an Extended Administrative Role-Based Access Control Model

Research and Implementation of an Extended Administrative Role-Based Access Control Model

CONUGA: Constrained User-Group Assignment

In role-based access control (RBAC), permissions are associated with roles and users are made members of appropriate roles, thereby acquiring the roles’ permissions. The principal motivation behind RBAC is to simplify administration. In this paper, we investigate one aspect of RBAC administration concerning assignment of users to roles. We introduce a constrained user-role assignment model, called CONUGA (CONstrained User-Group Assignment) and describe its implementation in the Windows NT system. Rather than set user and file rights individually for each and every user, the administrator can give rights to various groups, then place users within those groups in Windows NT. Each user within a group inherits the rights associated with that group. We demonstrate how to extend the Windows NT group mechanism supporting our model that is useful in managing group-based access control.

Role-based administration of user-role assignment: The URA97 model and its Oracle implementation

In role-based access control (RBAC) permissions are associated with roles, and users are made members of appropriate roles thereby acquiring the roles’ permissions. The principal motivation behind RBAC is to simplify administration. An appealing possibility is to use RBAC itself to manage RBAC, to further provide administrative convenience. In this paper we investigate one aspect of RBAC administration concerning assignment of users to roles. We define a role-based administrative model, called URA97 (User-Role Assignment ’97), for this purpose and describe its implementation in the Oracle database management system. Although our model is quite different from that built into Oracle, we demonstrate how to use Oracle stored procedures to implement it.