RBAC Model Research Articles

Flexible authorization in home network environments

In home network environments, OSGi platform plays a major role as the service gateway to access into home appliances. It is important to provide appropriate services as well as security mechanisms to protect confidential or sensitive information and devices. Authorization is especially important when controlling the access of different users. OSGi platform supports the role based access control but it does not support various facilities in the RBAC model. To address such shortcomings, several works have proposed the enhanced access control mechanisms for the OSGi service platform. However, these are still limited to applying the traditional RBAC conventions to OSGi platform. This paper extends the existing authorization mechanism of OSGi platform to address its limitations for dynamic deployments. By adding the relative role concept and activating the access control using the delegation model, proposed mechanism enables a diverse and outstanding access control. We implement the proposed mechanism using aspectJ and illustrate how to develop a bundle including access control logic.

A Generalized Temporal and Spatial Role-Based Access Control Model

Securing access to data, applied to mobile service applications with temporal and spatial controlling, requires constructing innovative definitions with temporal and spatial limitations for an access-control system. To cope with the temporal and spatial requirements, we propose a generalized Temporal and Spatial RBAC (TSRBAC) model. In the TSRBAC model, temporal-period and spatial-location based entities are used to constrain the permissions of objects, user positions, and geographically bounded roles. Furthermore, we also present temporal and spatial relations of Temporal and Spatial Separation of Duties (TSSSD), Temporal and Spatial Dynamic Separation of Duties (TSDSD) constraints in the TSRBAC model.

Privacy-aware role-based access control

In this article, we introduce a comprehensive framework supporting a privacy-aware access control mechanism, that is, a mechanism tailored to enforce access control to data containing personally identifiable information and, as such, privacy sensitive. The key component of the framework is a family of models (P-RBAC) that extend the well-known RBAC model in order to provide full support for expressing highly complex privacy-related policies, taking into account features like purposes and obligations. We formally define the notion of privacy-aware permissions and the notion of conflicting permission assignments in P-RBAC, together with efficient conflict-checking algorithms. The framework also includes a flexible authoring tool, based on the use of the SPARCLE system, supporting the high-level specification of P-RBAC permissions. SPARCLE supports the use of natural language for authoring policies and is able to automatically generate P-RBAC permissions from these natural language specifications. In the article, we also report performance evaluation results and contrast our approach with other relevant access control and privacy policy frameworks such as P3P, EPAL, and XACML.

Privacy-Aware Role-Based Access Control

A privacy-aware role-based access control model extends RBAC to express highly complex privacy-related policies, including consideration of such features as conditions and obligations. Because it's based on the RBAC model, the full-fledged P-RBAC solution is easy to deploy in systems already adopting RBAC, thus allowing seamless integration of access control and privacy policies.

Layer Model and Algorithm of Organization Authorization Based on Position Network

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SH-CRBAC: Integrating Attribute and Status Constraints into the RBAC Model in Smart Home Systems

The requirements for access control have been increased significantly in smart home systems. Many factors such as user ID, user location, service usage conditions and so on, regarded as authorization attributes, are important in making authorization decision in smart home systems. We investigate into the dynamic characteristics of the authorization in smart home systems and propose a new access-control model, SH-CRBAC, which aims to combine the advantages of attribute-based authorization mechanism and role-based access-control mechanism, and imposes attribute and status constraints on the RBAC model and enhances the generality and flexibility of authorization significantly in smart home systems. The status consistency of SH-CRBAC is analysed, and we also analyse the characteristics of SH-CRBAC through comparison with other popular existing authorization models in smart home systems.

Dynamic authorization scheme based on delegation in distributed system

Concerning the authority in distributed environment for collaboration,a dynamic authorization scheme was presented based on delegation and RBAC model.The scheme supports partial role delegation,by expanding element sets of RBAC model,enlarging static authorization operations,and allowing the delegator to create temporary delegation roles and assign others(the delegatee) to the particular roles.The scheme was implemented by three-level frameworks,and the operating process about how to authorize dynamically in delegation model was described.The application shows that the scheme can adapt to distributed and dynamic environment,and follow the least privilege principle.

Home gateway operating model using reference monitor for enhanced user comfort and privacy

In home network environments, user comfort and privacy are key prerequisites for customer satisfaction and data security. Although methods such as ACLs and others control the user-access for home network devices, most existing methods have yet to satisfactorily address the issues related to a user's comfort level and his or her protection of privacy. Therefore, this paper outlines the proposal for home gateway operating model using reference monitor in an OSGi service platform, whose goal is to enhance the operation required to efficiently meet a user's access, convenience, and privacy concerns. The reference monitor is a collection of access controls for objects, and is also capable of providing the facilities for access control. Furthermore, it adds the element of comfort to user access control, because it is intended as a core part of how subjects interact with objects. The proposed model is based on an RBAC model to effectively manage access control. Its policy is classified into two types (e.g., user-role assignment policy and permission-role assignment policy) in an attempt to not only better protect user privacy, but also to improve the performance of the policy operation. It is argued that the new home gateway model provides sufficient and effective guidelines to suggest future access control policies.

Extended RBAC model supporting dynamic role switching

Dynamic role switching is a kind of automatic authorization mechanism that the information system partly or wholly changes the user-role assignments based on the changes of user's attributes.The dynamic role switching was introduced into RBAC96 model.Different forms of the dynamic role switching,the relationships between the different switchings,and the realization of the extended model were presented.Based on the dynamic role switching,the information system can deal automatically with the situation of the user-role assignments triggered by the role switching condition.There is no need for the human being to participate in the role switching process.Therefor,dynamic role switching can lessen the work load of the system administrator and improve the efficiency and security of the authorization administration.

General attribute based RBAC model for web services

Growing numbers of users and many access policies that involve many different resource attributes in service-oriented environments cause various problems in protecting resource. This paper analyzes the relationships of resource attributes to user attributes based on access policies for Web services, and proposes a general attribute based role-based access control(GARBAC) model. The model introduces the notions of single attribute expression, composite attribute expression, and composition permission, defines a set of elements and relations among its elements and makes a set of rules, assigns roles to user by inputing user’s attributes values. The model is a general access control model, can support more granularity resource information and rich access control policies, also can be used to wider application for services. The paper also describes how to use the GARBAC model in Web services environments.

A formal model for access control with supporting spatial context

There is an emerging recognition of the importance of utilizing contextual information in authorization decisions. Controlling access to resources in the field of wireless and mobile networking require the definition of a formal model for access control with supporting spatial context. However, traditional RBAC model does not specify these spatial requirements. In this paper, we extend the existing RBAC model and propose the SC-RBAC model that utilizes spatial and location-based information in security policy definitions. The concept of spatial role is presented, and the role is assigned a logical location domain to specify the spatial boundary. Roles are activated based on the current physical position of the user which obtained from a specific mobile terminal. We then extend SC-RBAC to deal with hierarchies, modeling permission, user and activation inheritance, and prove that the hierarchical spatial roles are capable of constructing a lattice which is a means for articulate multi-level security policy and more suitable to control the information flow security for safety-critical location-aware information systems. Next, constrained SC-RBAC allows express various spatial separations of duty constraints, location-based cardinality and temporal constraints for specify fine-grained spatial semantics that are typical in location-aware systems. Finally, we introduce 9 invariants for the constrained SC-RBAC and its basic security theorem is proven. The constrained SC-RBAC provides the foundation for applications in need of the constrained spatial context aware access control.

INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RBAC-MAS: AN APPROACH BASED ON AGENT COORDINATION CONTEXTS

In this article, we discuss how to shape a MAS infrastructure to support an agent-oriented, role-based access control model (RBAC-MAS). First, we introduce the RBAC model, and show how it can be extended to capture the essential features of agent systems. Then, we extrapolate the core requirements of an infrastructure for RBAC-MAS, and depict a possible approach based on ACCs (agent coordination contexts). The conceptual framework for an RBAC-MAS infrastructure exploiting ACCs is subsequently formalized through a process-algebraic description of the main infrastructure entities: This is meant to serve as a formal specification of both the infrastructure and the language for expressing roles, operations, and policies in RBAC-MAS.

GEO-RBAC

Securing access to data in location-based services and mobile applications requires the definition of spatially aware access-control systems. Even if some approaches have already been proposed either in the context of geographic database systems or context-aware applications, a comprehensive framework, general and flexible enough to deal with spatial aspects in real mobile applications, is still missing. In this paper, we make one step toward this direction and present GEO-RBAC, an extension of the RBAC model enhanced with spatial-and location-based information. In GEORBAC, spatial entities are used to model objects, user positions, and geographically bounded roles. Roles are activated based on the position of the user. Besides a physical position, obtained from a given mobile terminal or a cellular phone, users are also assigned a logical and device-independent position, representing the feature (the road, the town, the region) in which they are located. To enhance flexibility and reusability, we also introduce the concept of role schema, specifying the name of the role, as well as the type of the role spatial boundary and the granularity of the logical position. We then extend GEO-RBAC to support hierarchies, modeling permission, user, and activation inheritance, and separation of duty constraints. The proposed classes of constraints extend the conventional ones to deal with different granularities (schema/instance level) and spatial information. We conclude the paper with an analysis of several properties concerning the resulting model.

An Administrative Model for Role-Based Access Control Using Hierarchical Namespace

Access Control is an important mechanism of information security. Role-Based Access Control is a famous access control approach with good flexibility. RBAC96 and ARBAC97 are classical RBAC models. The ARBAC97 model facilitates decentralized administration of RBAC. However, ARBAC97 has some shortcomings in the case of being used in an organization with autonomous subsidiaries. The member of an administrative role can operate directly in the role range of a junior administrative role, which violates the autonomy of subsidiaries. We propose a new model named N-RBAC to overcome this weakness. In NRBAC, roles are arranged according to a hierarchical namespace structure. Thus the role hierarchy is constructed in a local space instead of in a global space. The N-RBAC model does a better work in decentralized role administration in those organizations composed of autonomous subsidiaries.

Path-history-based access control for mobile agents

The mobility of agents is a distinct characteristic of mobile agent systems. Meanwhile, it has introduced new security issues. In this paper, we analyze the impact of an agent's path history (PH), as a resulting attribution of its mobility, on the access control decisions against it. The path could be an authorization basis. At the same time, the validity of the statically defined trust relationship with mobile agents is to be re-evaluated respecting where they have been, in which case the path information serves as a debasement of agents' trust degree and, therefore, weakens their privileges. To build a path-history-based access control model for the mobile agent application environment, path pattern and host patch are proposed here as conceptional components to declare the dynamic trust relationship with the migrating agents in a flexible and fine-grained manner. An integration of these two components with the well-known RBAC model is presented formally as a phRBAC model. Several application scenarios of phRBAC show its ability to enforce the special security policy in mobile agent environment. Some issues in implementing such a model are also discussed.

A distributed role-based access control model for multi-domain environments

Access control in multi-domain environments is an important question in building coalition between domains. Based on the RBAC access control model and the concepts of secure domain, the role delegation and role mapping are proposed, which support the third-party authorization. A distributed RBAC model is then presented. Finally implementation issues are discussed.

Dynamically authorized role-based access control for grid applications

Grid computing is concerned with the sharing and coordinated use of diverse resources in distributed “virtual organizations”. The heterogeneous, dynamic and multi-domain nature of these environments makes challenging security issues that demand new technical approaches. Despite the recent advances in access control approaches applicable to Grid computing, there remain issues that impede the development of effective access control models for Grid applications. Among them there are the lack of context-based models for access control, and reliance on identity or capability-based access control schemes. An access control scheme that resolve these issues is presented, and a dynamically authorized role-based access control (D-RBAC) model extending the RBAC with context constraints is proposed. The D-RABC mechanisms dynamically grant permissions to users based on a set of contextual information collected from the system and user's environments, while retaining the advantages of RBAC model. The implementation architecture of D-RBAC for the Grid aplication is also described.

A network access control approach based on the AAA architecture and authorization attributes

Network access control mechanisms constitute an increasingly needed service, when communications are becoming more and more ubiquitous thanks to some technologies such as wireless networks or Mobile IP. This paper presents a particular scenario where access rules are based not only on the identity of the different users but also on authorization data related to those users. In order to accomplish this general goal, it will be necessary to add to the traditional system-specific services for authentication and authorization, and also some entities able to manage the information related to identity, roles and permissions. Network access will be based on the 802.1X framework and the Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) architecture, as they constitute the basis for most of the existing proposals for limiting the access to a restricted network. These proposals will be extended making use of an authorization infrastructure based on SAML statements, the RBAC model, and XACML as the main language for expressing authorization policies. The solution that we present in this paper is a consequence of an exhaustive and non-trivial analysis of the different mechanisms that could be used to provide this kind of service. As we will see, the correct integration of these different mechanisms leads to the definition of a scalable and versatile network access control system which conforms to the guidelines outlined by the AAA initiative.

A Constrained Role-Based Delegation Model

Delegation is an important security policy that should be supported by RBAC model. The basic idea of delegation is that some active entity in a system delegates authority to another active entity to carry out some functions on behalf of the former. The grantor of the delegated roles should be responsible for the usage of them, so constraints on the usage of the delegated roles are critical components of the whole delegation model. Currently, there’re some models that extend RBAC model to support role delegation. However, their supports for constraints on the usage of delegated roles are very limited. This paper presents the requirements of role-based delegation, including temporary constraints, regular role dependency constraints, partial delegation constraints and propagation constraints. The former two kinds of constraints are modeled with a formal model – CRDM, which provides the foundation for applications in need of the constrained delegation.

Distributed role-based access control for coaliagion application

Access control in multi-domain environments is one of the important questions of building coalition between domains. On the basis of RBAC access control model, the concepts of role delegation and role mapping are proposed, which support the third-party authorization. Then, a distributed RBAC model is presented. Finally the implementation issues are discussed.