Existing Access Control Mechanisms Research Articles

Survey of Secure Data Access Control Models in Cloud computing for EHR

Today cloud computing is the first choice of many individuals and different organizations. Computing services offered by different CSP’s are available as per need and the requirement. Most of the healthcare organizations are using cloud services for transmitting, storing and processing electronic health records (EHR) of patients. Patient’s health record is sensitive and there is possibility of violation of privacy by CSP’s. Data access control is one of the best mechanisms to address security issues in cloud computing and ensure the safety, reliability of the system and privacy of the user data. Existing surveys on access control mechanisms in cloud computing focus on all traditional centralized models. However, decentralized access models like block chain with traditional access control model is also used now days for ensuring privacy of EHR. This paper takes the detailed of reviews such existing access control mechanisms in cloud computing, based both types of access control models. Also provides comparisons on each model’s advantages and limitations, and discusses the challenges of, and future research direction for access control.

SparkAC: Fine-Grained Access Control in Spark for Secure Data Sharing and Analytics

With the development of computing and communication technologies, an extremely large amount of data has been collected, stored, utilized, and shared, while new security and privacy challenges arise. Existing access control mechanisms provided by big data platforms have limitations in granularity and expressiveness. In this article, we present SparkAC, a novel access control mechanism for secure data sharing and analysis in Spark. In particular, we first propose a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">purpose-aware access control</i> (PAAC) model, which introduces new concepts of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">data processing purpose</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">data operation purpose</i> and an automatic purpose analysis algorithm that identifies purposes from data analytics operations and queries. Moreover, we develop a unified access control mechanism that implements PAAC model in two modules. GuardSpark++ supports structured data access control in Spark Catalyst and GuardDAG supports unstructured data access control in Spark core. Finally, we evaluate GuardSpark++ and GuardDAG with multiple data sources, applications, and data analytics engines. Experimental results show that SparkAC provides effective access control functionalities with very small (GuardSpark++) or medium (GuardDAG) performance overhead.

A smart access control mechanism based on user preference in online social networks

SummaryAccess control can effectively protect users' data and privacy in social networks. Different access control models address different data privacy requirements, and the corresponding implementation technologies and performance are also quite different. The existing access control mechanisms of social networks rarely take into account the individual preferences of users, and cannot provide personalized services for users. Therefore, we have studied an analysis mechanism of user preference to quantify user preferences, and then use user preference values and some key information of users' social resources as decision vectors, and proposed an access control mechanism based on user preference (ACMBUP). ACMBUP turns the problem of access decision‐making into a problem of classification, that is, whether to allow access or not to allow access. At the same time, we add an encryption and decryption mechanism in ACMBUP to prevent data leakage and protect data when users interact with access mechanisms. Experiments show that this mechanism can automatically generate appropriate access control policies to meet the potential privacy needs of different users, so as to better protect the privacy of social networks data.

Survey of Centralized and Decentralized Access Control Models in Cloud Computing

In recent years, cloud computing has become a popular option for a number of different businesses sectors. It is a paradigm employed to deliver a range of computing services, such as sharing resources via the Internet. Security issues in cloud computing necessitates the need for a mechanism to keep the system safe and reliable. An access control mechanism is one that permits or denies access to cloud services. This paper presents a survey of access control models in Cloud Computing. Several existing surveys on access control mechanisms in cloud computing mainly focused on traditional access control models and encryption-based access control models while the others focused on applying blockchain technology in cloud access control. However, access models possess different characteristics, such as the system’s reliance on a centralized cloud trusted system administrator to manage the access policy or adopting decentralized approach. This paper reviews and analyses existing access control mechanisms in cloud computing, based on centralized and decentralized access control models, provides detailed comparisons on each model’s advantages and limitations, and discusses the challenges of, and future research direction for access control.

BCON: Blockchain based access CONtrol across multiple conflict of interest domains

In today's on-demand computing and virtual coalition environment, cross-domain services are acquired and provided. These business domains may belong to either the same or different conflict of interest system. “Transitive access” can cause leakage of information between competitors through some other conflict of interest system's member. Therefore, a secure access control mechanism is required to detect and deny “transitive access” efficiently with minimal trust in externalist. Existing access control mechanisms focused on either single or multiple conflict of interest domains but with no “transitive access”. In addition, these existing mechanisms are centralized with inherited unfair access control and are a single point of failure. Blockchain (BC) is a shared digital ledger encompassing a list of connected blocks stored on a decentralized distributed network that is secured through cryptography. We propose a BC based access control for conflict of interest domains. We have integrated a BC in our architecture to make access control fair, verifiable and decentralized. Users access histories and “transitive accesses” are stored on BC ledger. We propose a novel mechanism called “Transitive Access Checking and Enforcement (TACE)” i.e., “Algorithm.1”. It makes an authorization decision based on BC endorsement that “transitive access” will not occur. “Algorithm.2” verifies and updates users access histories stored at BC before each request approval. Similarly, “Algorithm.3” detects possible future “transitive accesses” and updates Transitive Access Set (TAS) stored at BC after each request approval. The Simple Promela Interpreter (SPIN) model checker is used to verify the proposed mechanisms for “transitive access” detection and prevention. We have identified four conflicting sequences of execution that can cause “transitive access”. Results show that the proposed mechanism is safe against “transitive access” by checking all the four possible conflicting sequences of execution.

A survey on access control mechanisms for cloud computing

AbstractCloud computing is an Internet‐based computing where the information technology resources are provided to end users following their request. With this technology, users and businesses can access programs, storage, and application development platforms through the Internet and via the services offered by the cloud service providers (CSPs). One of the biggest obstructions in the cloud computing environment is data security. Actually, the data are dispersed across multiple machines and storage devices such as servers, computers, and various mobile devices. The uncontrolled access to these resources and data leads to many important data security risks for the end users. In this way, and in order to ensure the reliability of the cloud and the trust of the users regarding this environment, controlling access to data and resources as well as protecting and ensuring their security becomes a critical task for CSPs. In this work, we present a comprehensive review of existing access control mechanisms used in the cloud computing environment. The advantages and disadvantages of each of these models are discussed and presented along with their analysis. Also, we study the cloud requirements of these models, and we evaluate existing control mechanisms against these requirements.

Use of ESSENCE APIs to Support Flexible Analysis and Reporting

ObjectiveTo describe and provide examples of the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE) application programming interface (API) as a part of disease surveillance workflows.IntroductionThe ESSENCE application supports users’ interactive analysis of data by clicking through menus in a user interface (UI), and provides multiple types of user defined data visualization options, including various charts and graphs, tables of statistical alerts, table builder functionality, spatial mapping, and report generation. However, no UI supports all potential analysis and visualization requirements. Rapidly accessing data processed through ESSENCE using existing access control mechanisms, but de-coupled from the UI, supports innovative analyses, visualizations and reporting of these data using other tools.MethodsThe ESSENCE API gives users the ability to query ESSENCE data and functionality via a Representational State Transfer (REST) web API designed to use HTTPs protocol. As with logging into the ESSENCE application normally, use of the API also requires users to authenticate with their username and password by including it in the code. This makes programmatic interfaces with the application possible whereby a tool or program makes a request to the API endpoint and the API returns the result of the query in a structured form. The ESSENCE API is a collection of endpoints that return different sets of data, including ESSENCE time series graphs, time series data, data details data, aggregated data created using the table builder functionality, number of unique facilities or regions (i.e. counties) reporting for a query, and results from the detector algorithms and alert list. All of the query parameter information is stored in the API URL, which the user can create programmatically or by first creating their query from within ESSENCE, and then clicking the “API URL” to generate the necessary URL. API results are generally available in both json and csv formats.ResultsEpidemiologists in the CDC NSSP have developed R code that uses these APIs to create customized Rmarkdown reports and visualizations not possible within the ESSENCE application, as well as to automate extraction of data from ESSENCE to support routine reporting for other CDC program areas (e.g., influenza-like illness, and suspected opioid encounters). Anecdotally, some Sites utilize the API to populate publically facing dashboards with aggregated data from ESSENCE. Programmatic access to processed ESSENCE data via the APIs also supports easily sharable exploratory analysis and visualization that can serve as a sandbox for testing new methods for future inclusion within ESSENCE.ConclusionsThe development and use of the ESSENCE APIs in public health surveillance will support more efficient and timely access to machine-readable data de-coupled from point and click user interfaces, and has the potential to spur new and innovative ways of using data that has traditionally been less programmatically accessible to users. New tools and programs can leverage the data in web or mobile applications, traditional reports, and more easily integrate disparate data sources for comprehensive surveillance.

Security, Privacy, and Access Control in Information-Centric Networking: A Survey

Information-centric networking (ICN) replaces the widely used host-centric networking paradigm in communication networks (e.g., Internet and mobile ad hoc networks) with an information-centric paradigm, which prioritizes the delivery of named content, oblivious of the contents’ origin. Content and client security, provenance, and identity privacy are intrinsic by design in the ICN paradigm as opposed to the current host centric paradigm where they have been instrumented as an after-thought. However, given its nascency, the ICN paradigm has several open security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we survey the existing literature in security and privacy in ICN and present open questions. More specifically, we explore three broad areas: 1) security threats; 2) privacy risks; and 3) access control enforcement mechanisms. We present the underlying principle of the existing works, discuss the drawbacks of the proposed approaches, and explore potential future research directions. In security, we review attack scenarios, such as denial of service, cache pollution, and content poisoning. In privacy, we discuss user privacy and anonymity, name and signature privacy, and content privacy. ICN’s feature of ubiquitous caching introduces a major challenge for access control enforcement that requires special attention. We review existing access control mechanisms including encryption-based, attribute-based, session-based, and proxy re-encryption-based access control schemes. We conclude the survey with lessons learned and scope for future work.

On the Possibility of Insider Threat Prevention Using Intent-Based Access Control (IBAC)

Existing access control mechanisms are based on the concept of identity enrolment and recognition and assume that recognized identity is a synonym to ethical actions, yet statistics over the years show that the most severe security breaches are the results of trusted, identified, and legitimate users who turned into malicious insiders. Insider threat damages vary from intellectual property loss and fraud to information technology sabotage. As insider threat incidents evolve, there exist demands for a nonidentity-based authentication measure that rejects access to authorized individuals who have mal-intents of access. In this paper, we study the possibility of using the user's intention as an access control measure using the involuntary electroencephalogram reactions toward visual stimuli. We propose intent-based access control (IBAC) that detects the intentions of access based on the existence of knowledge about an intention. IBAC takes advantage of the robustness of the concealed information test to assess access risk. We use the intent and intent motivation level to compute the access risk. Based on the calculated risk and risk accepted threshold, the system makes the decision whether to grant or deny access requests. We assessed the model using experiments on 30 participants that proved the robustness of the proposed solution.

Extensible access control with authorization contracts

Existing programming language access control frameworks do not meet the needs of all software components. We propose an expressive framework for implementing access control monitors for components. The basis of the framework is a novel concept: the authority environment. An authority environment associates rights with an execution context. The building blocks of access control monitors in our framework are authorization contracts: software contracts that manage authority environments. We demonstrate the expressiveness of our framework by implementing a diverse set of existing access control mechanisms and writing custom access control monitors for three realistic case studies.

A Novel Reference Security Model with the Situation Based Access Policy for Accessing EPHR Data.

Electronic Patient Health Record (EPHR) systems may facilitate a patient not only to share his/her health records securely with healthcare professional but also to control his/her health privacy, in a convenient and easy way even in case of emergency. In order to fulfill these requirements, it is greatly desirable to have the access control mechanism which can efficiently handle every circumstance without negotiating security. However, the existing access control mechanisms used in healthcare to regulate and restrict the disclosure of patient data are often bypassed in case of emergencies. In this article, we propose a way to securely share EPHR data under any situation including break-the-glass (BtG) without compromising its security. In this regard, we design a reference security model, which consists of a multi-level data flow hierarchy, and an efficient access control framework based on the conventional Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Mandatory Access Control (MAC) policies.

Query Monitoring and Analysis for Database Privacy - A Security Automata Model Approach.

Privacy and usage restriction issues are important when valuable data are exchanged or acquired by different organizations. Standard access control mechanisms either restrict or completely grant access to valuable data. On the other hand, data obfuscation limits the overall usability and may result in loss of total value. There are no standard policy enforcement mechanisms for data acquired through mutual and copyright agreements. In practice, many different types of policies can be enforced in protecting data privacy. Hence there is the need for an unified framework that encapsulates multiple suites of policies to protect the data. We present our vision of an architecture named security automata model (SAM) to enforce privacy-preserving policies and usage restrictions. SAM analyzes the input queries and their outputs to enforce various policies, liberating data owners from the burden of monitoring data access. SAM allows administrators to specify various policies and enforces them to monitor queries and control the data access. Our goal is to address the problems of data usage control and protection through privacy policies that can be defined, enforced, and integrated with the existing access control mechanisms using SAM. In this paper, we lay out the theoretical foundation of SAM, which is based on an automata named Mandatory Result Automata. We also discuss the major challenges of implementing SAM in a real-world database environment as well as ideas to meet such challenges.

Adapting Law Enforcement Frameworks to Address the Ethical Problems of CCTV Product Propagation

The development of video sharing and analytic capabilities is outpacing ethical debate and governance policy. To mitigate privacy abuse and prevent unauthorized data sharing, an inter-entity audit framework, based on a law enforcement methodology, documents video-sharing activity without duplicating existing access control mechanisms.

An Authorization Mechanism for Access Control of Resources in the Web Services Paradigm

With the increase in web based enterprise services, there is an increasing trend among business enterprises to migrate to web services platform. Web services paradigm poses a number of new security challenges, which can only be realized by developing effective access control models. The fact that the enterprises allow access to the resources through web services requires development of access control models that can capture relevant information about a service requester at the time of access request and incorporate this information for making effective access control decisions. Researchers have addressed many issues related to authentication and authorization of web services requests for accessing resources, but the issues related to authorization work and identity based access are still poorly addressed. Authors of this paper focus on providing an extended approach to capture relevant information about a service requester and establish a certain level of trust so that amount of authorization work required for accessing any resource is reduced and service requests are served in an efficient manner. Compared with existing access control mechanisms, the proposed mechanism has reduced the amount of authorization work required for accessing resources across varied domains.

Active access control (AAC) with fine‐granularity and scalability

AbstractStrong access control mechanisms become most critical when we need security services in large‐scale computing environments of sensitive organizations. Furthermore, if users join or leave such computing environment frequently, requiring different access control decisions based on their current job responsibilities and contexts, the need for advanced access control is pressing. Although the currently available access control approaches have a great potential for providing reliable service, there are still critical obstacles to be solved, especially in large‐scale, dynamic computing environments. In this paper we introduce an advanced access control mechanism, Active Access Control (AAC), which accounts for the ability to make dynamic access control decisions based not only on pre‐defined privileges, but also on the current situation of the user. The framework of the proposed AAC approach provides fine‐grained access control, by considering a variety of attributes about the user and the current computing environment, especially, when the users contexts are frequently changed. Although the outputs of the AAC approach can be integrated with any other existing access control mechanisms and improve the overall fine‐granularity, as a full demonstration of our approach for fine‐granularity as well as scalability, in this particular paper we focus on large‐scale computing environments and integrate the AAC results with the role‐based approach. Finally, in order to prove the feasibility of our proposed idea we implement the AAC approach with roles and discuss the evaluation results with existing approaches. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

The Policy Machine: A novel architecture and framework for access control policy specification and enforcement

The ability to control access to sensitive data in accordance with policy is perhaps the most fundamental security requirement. Despite over four decades of security research, the limited ability for existing access control mechanisms to generically enforce policy persists. While researchers, practitioners and policy makers have specified a large variety of access control policies to address real-world security issues, only a relatively small subset of these policies can be enforced through off-the-shelf technology, and even a smaller subset can be enforced by any one mechanism. In this paper, we propose an access control framework, referred to as the Policy Machine (PM) that fundamentally changes the way policy is expressed and enforced. Employing PM helps in building high assurance enforcement mechanisms in three respects. First, only a relatively small piece of the overall access control mechanism needs to be included in the host system (e.g., an operating system or application). This significantly reduces the amount of code that needs to be trusted. Second, it is possible to enforce the precise policies of resource owners, without compromise on enforcement or resorting to less effective administrative procedures. Third, the PM is capable of generically imposing confinement constraints that can be used to prevent leakage of information to unauthorized principals within the context of a variety of policies to include the commonly implemented Discretionary Access Control and Role-Based Access Control models.