Analysis Of Access Control Policies 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.

A graph-based framework for the analysis of access control policies

We design a graph-based framework for the analysis of access control policies that aims at easing the specification and verification tasks for security administrators. We consider policies in the category-based access control model, which has been shown to subsume many of the most well known access control models (e.g., MAC, DAC, RBAC). Using a graphical representation of category-based policies, we show how answers to usual administrator queries can be automatically computed, and properties of access control policies checked. We show applications in the context of emergency situations, where our framework can be used to analyse the interaction between access control and emergency management.

Parameterized model checking for security policy analysis

We explain how a parameterized model checking technique can be exploited to mechanize the analysis of access control policies. The main advantage of the approach is to reason regardless of the number of users of the system in which the policy is enforced. This permits to obtain more useful results from the analysis; for instance, ensuring that sensitive permissions cannot be leaked regardless of the number of users in the system. We also briefly discuss how some heuristics make the technique scalable to handle (very) large policies. This is demonstrated by a comparative experimental evaluation with state-of-the-art tools for the analysis of access control policies.

A twofold model for the analysis of access control policies in industrial networked systems

Requirements concerning the specification and correct implementation of access control policies have become more and more popular in industrial networked systems during the last years. Unfortunately, the peculiar characteristics of industrial systems often prevent the designer from taking full advantage of technologies and techniques already developed and profitably employed in other application areas. In particular, the unavailability and/or impossibility of adopting hardware (h/w) and software (s/w) mechanisms able to automatically enforce the policies defined at a high level of abstraction, often results in checking the correctness of policy implementation in the real system manually. The first step towards carrying out this cumbersome task in an automated way is the development of a model able to capture both the high level policy specification as well as the details and low-level mechanisms characterizing the actual system implementation. This paper introduces a twofold model for the description of access control policies in industrial environments aimed at coping with this requirement and which can be profitably adopted in several kinds of automated analysis.

A Framework for the Analysis of Access Control Policies with Emergency Management

We define a framework for the analysis of access control policies that aims at easing the specification and verification tasks for security administrators. We consider policies in the category-based access control model, which has been shown to subsume many of the most well known access control models (e.g., MAC, DAC, RBAC). Using a graphical representation of category-based policies, we show how answers to usual administrator queries can be automatically computed, and properties of access control policies can be checked. We show applications in the context of emergency situations, where our framework can be used to analyse the interaction between access control and emergency management.

Access Control Policy Analysis and Access Denial Method for Cloud Services

Personal cloud computing is an emerging trend in the computer industry. For a sustainable service, cloud computing services must control user access. The essential business characteristics of cloud computing are payment status and service level agreement. This work proposes a novel access control method for personal cloud service business. The proposed method sets metadata, policy analysis rules, and access denying rules. Metadata define the structure of access control policies and user requirements for cloud services. The policy analysis rules are used to compare conflicts and redundancies between access control policies. The access denying rules apply policies for inhibiting inappropriate access. The ontology is a theoretical foundation of this method. In this work, ontologies for payment status, access permission, service level, and the cloud provide semantic information needed to execute rules. A scenario of personal data backup cloud service is also provided in this work. This work potentially provides cloud service providers with a convenient method of controlling user access according to changeable business and marketing strategies.

Managing Privacy and Effectiveness of Patient-Administered Authorization Policies

A central building block of data privacy is the individual right of information self-determination. Following from that when dealing with shared electronic health records (SEHR), citizens, as the identified individuals of such records, have to be enabled to decide what medical data can be used in which way by medical professionals. In this context individual preferences of privacy have to be reflected by authorization policies to control access to personal health data. There are two potential challenges when enabling patient-controlled access control policy authoring: First, an ordinary citizen neither can be considered a security expert, nor does she or he have the expertise to fully understand typical activities and workflows within the health-care domain. Thus, a citizen is not necessarily aware of implications her or his access control settings have with regards to the protection of personal health data. Both privacy of citizen’s health-data and the overall effectiveness of a health-care information system are at risk if inadequate access control settings are in place. This paper refers to scenarios of a case study previously conducted and shows how privacy and information system effectiveness can be defined and evaluated in the context of SEHR. The paper describes an access control policy analysis method which evaluates a patient-administered access control policy by considering the mentioned evaluation criteria.

EXAM: a comprehensive environment for the analysis of access control policies

Policy integration and inter-operation is often a crucial requirement when parties with different access control policies need to participate in collaborative applications and coalitions. Such requirement is even more difficult to address for dynamic large-scale collaborations, in which the number of access control policies to analyze and compare can be quite large. An important step in policy integration and inter-operation is to analyze the similarity of policies. Policy similarity can sometimes also be a pre-condition for establishing a collaboration, in that a party may enter a collaboration with another party only if the policies enforced by the other party match or are very close to its own policies. Existing approaches to the problem of analyzing and comparing access control policies are very limited, in that they only deal with some special cases. By recognizing that a suitable approach to the policy analysis and comparison requires combining different approaches, we propose in this paper a comprehensive environment—EXAM. The environment supports various types of analysis query, which we categorize in the paper. A key component of such environment, on which we focus in the paper, is the policy analyzer able to perform several types of analysis. Specifically, our policy analyzer combines the advantages of existing MTBDD-based and SAT-solver-based techniques. Our experimental results, also reported in the paper, demonstrate the efficiency of our analyzer.