Role-based Access Control Policies Research Articles

DetAC: Approach to Detect Access Control Vulnerability in Web Application Based on Sitemap Model with Global Information Representation

Access control vulnerabilities that lead to elevated privileges are among the most dangerous vulnerabilities in Web applications. Most of the existing detection methods use dynamic or static analysis techniques alone, which suffer from high manual involvement, low automation, high leakage rate, low page coverage, and other deficiencies. To this end, this paper proposes a novel access control vulnerability detection method (DetAC) based on a sitemap model with global information representation. This method first constructs a static site-wide sitemap model based on the page link addresses in the Web application source code through static analysis techniques. After that, the application is logged in and executed dynamically with different role users. During this process, execution traces and request parameters are collected and converted into annotations to fill the corresponding edges of the static site-wide sitemap model. Then, the sitemap model with global information representation is obtained. This model can represent both the global control flow and data flow of the application. Then DetAC analyzes the role-based and user-based access control policies of the Web application based on the node reachability and annotated data features of the model. And according to the information such as role, user, and access resources, it generates attack vectors to achieve different roles and the same role of different users to access each other’s resources. Finally, access control vulnerabilities are detected based on the equivalence of the results obtained using attack vector access and normal access to the Web application server. DetAC was validated on five real open-source Web applications, and the results showed that DetAC successfully detected up to 12 access control vulnerabilities, which are more than those of the traditional seven tools. The dynamic analysis page coverage rate was significantly improved during the detection process, reaching an average of 91.37%.

Privacy Protected Preservation of Electric Vehicles’ Data in Cloud Computing Using Secure Data Access Control

Cloud computing provides a ubiquitous data storage and access mechanism for organizations, industries, and smart grids to facilitate their operations. However, the concern in cloud storage systems is to secure data access control toward authentication for sensitive data, such as the electric vehicles (EVs) requesting information for attending a charging service. Consequently, denying an authentic user’s request will result in delaying the requested service, thereby leading to service inefficiency. The role-based access control (RBAC) plays a crucial role in securing and authenticating such time-sensitive data. The design mechanism of roles is based on skills, authority, and responsibilities for organizations. For EVs, the roles are based on the type of membership, such as permanent, occasional, or one-time. In this paper, we propose a new RBAC access control and privacy-preserving information access method toward the coarse-grained measure control and privacy protection in the cloud storage system for EVs. The data can be encrypted and decrypted based on the types of users who possess appropriate access permission toward authorized and unauthorized users according to their roles specified by role-based access control policies. The proposed approach has been simulated with various role-based scenarios, and the efficiency was evaluated against state-of-the-art role-based access-control techniques.

Modeling and analysis of port supply chain system based on Fabric blockchain

With the development of international trade, the core position of port transportation progressively emerges. However, most current port supply chain systems adopt a centralized data management mode. Each operator in the supply chain has its platform and data set, which is prone to form information islands and can create trust issues, resulting in the inefficient overall operation of the supply chain. To improve the efficiency of the supply chain, a port supply chain system based on Fabric blockchain (Fabric-PSChain) is designed and implemented. In the proposed system, four smart contracts are developed by taking advantage of the blockchain’s decentralized, tamper-free, distributed consensus, combined with the Role-Based Access Control Policy (RBACP), realizing the functions of access control policy formulation, enterprise list query, cargo order uploading, and order query. At the same time, the regulator node is added to the Fabric-PSchain system to enhance the credibility and security of data and meet regulatory compliance requirements. Experimental results show that the Fabric-PSChain system has vital confidentiality and data sharing that can speed up the operation of the port supply chain business and has significant application value for the shipping logistics industry.

Dynamic Role-Based Access Control Policy for Smart Grid Applications: An Offline Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Role-based access control (RBAC) is adopted in the information and communication technology domain for authentication purposes. However, due to a very large number of entities within organizational access control (AC) systems, static RBAC management can be inefficient, costly, and can lead to cybersecurity threats. In this article, a novel hybrid RBAC model is proposed, based on the principles of offline deep reinforcement learning (RL) and Bayesian belief networks. The considered framework utilizes a fully offline RL agent, which models the behavioral history of users as a Bayesian belief-based trust indicator. Thus, the initial static RBAC policy is improved in a dynamic manner through off-policy learning while guaranteeing compliance of the internal users with the security rules of the system. By deploying our implementation within the smart grid domain and specifically within a Distributed Energy Resources (DER) ecosystem, we provide an end-to-end proof of concept of our model. Finally, detailed analysis and evaluation regarding the offline training phase of the RL agent are provided, while the online deployment of the hybrid RL-based RBAC model into the DER ecosystem highlights its key operation features and salient benefits over traditional RBAC models.

DSMAC: Privacy-Aware Decentralized Self-Management of Data Access Control Based on Blockchain for Health Data

In recent years, the interest in using wireless communication technologies and mobile devices in the healthcare environment has increased. However, despite increased attention to the security of electronic health records, patient privacy is still at risk for data breaches. Thus, it is quite a challenge to involve an access control system especially if the patients’ medical data are accessible by users who have diverse privileges in different situations. Blockchain is a new technology that can be adopted for decentralized access control management issues. Nevertheless, different scalability, security, and privacy challenges affect this technology. To address these issues, we suggest a novel Decentralized Self-Management of data Access Control (DSMAC) system using a blockchain-based Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) model for privacy-preserving medical data, empowering patients with mechanisms to preserve control over their personal information and allowing them to self-grant access rights to their medical data. DSMAC leverages smart contracts to conduct Role-based Access Control policies and adopts the implementation of decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials to describe advanced access control techniques for emergency cases. Finally, by evaluating performance and comparing analyses with other schemes, DSMAC can satisfy the privacy requirements of medical systems in terms of privacy, scalability, and sustainability, and offers a new approach for emergency cases.

Automated reverse engineering of role-based access control policies of web applications

Access control (AC) is an important security mechanism used in software systems to restrict access to sensitive resources. Therefore, it is essential to validate the correctness of AC implementations with respect to policy specifications or intended access rights. However, in practice, AC policy specifications are often missing or poorly documented; in some cases, AC policies are hard-coded in business logic implementations. This leads to difficulties in validating the correctness of policy implementations and detecting AC defects.In this paper, we present a semi-automated framework for reverse-engineering of AC policies from Web applications. Our goal is to learn and recover role-based access control (RBAC) policies from implementations, which are then used to validate implemented policies and detect AC issues. Our framework, built on top of a suite of security tools, automatically explores a given Web application, mines domain input specifications from access logs, and systematically generates and executes more access requests using combinatorial test generation. To learn policies, we apply machine learning on the obtained data to characterize relevant attributes that influence AC. Finally, the inferred policies are presented to the security engineer, for validation with respect to intended access rights and for detecting AC issues. Inconsistent and insufficient policies are highlighted as potential AC issues, being either vulnerabilities or implementation errors.We evaluated our approach on four Web applications (three open-source and a proprietary one built by our industry partner) in terms of the correctness of inferred policies. We also evaluated the usefulness of our approach by investigating whether it facilitates the detection of AC issues. The results show that 97.8% of the inferred policies are correct with respect to the actual AC implementation; the analysis of these policies led to the discovery of 64 AC issues that were reported to the developers.

On automated RBAC assessment by constructing a centralized perspective for microservice mesh.

It is important in software development to enforce proper restrictions on protected services and resources. Typically software services can be accessed through REST API endpoints where restrictions can be applied using the Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model. However, RBAC policies can be inconsistent across services, and they require proper assessment. Currently, developers use penetration testing, which is a costly and cumbersome process for a large number of APIs. In addition, modern applications are split into individual microservices and lack a unified view in order to carry out automated RBAC assessment. Often, the process of constructing a centralized perspective of an application is done using Systematic Architecture Reconstruction (SAR). This article presents a novel approach to automated SAR to construct a centralized perspective for a microservice mesh based on their REST communication pattern. We utilize the generated views from SAR to propose an automated way to find RBAC inconsistencies.

Secured Data Storage and Retrieval using Elliptic Curve Cryptography in Cloud

Security of data stored in the cloud databases is a challenging and complex issue to be addressed due to the presence of malicious attacks, data breaches and unsecured access points. In the past, many researchers proposed security mechanisms including access control, intrusion detection and prevention models, Encryption based storage methods and key management schemes. However, the role based access control policies that were developed to provide security for the data stored in cloud databases based on the sensitivity of the information are compromised by the attackers through the misuse of privileges gained by them from multiple roles. Therefore, it is necessary to propose more efficient mechanisms for securing the sensitive information through attribute based encryption by analyzing the association between the various attributes. For handling the security issue related to the large volume of cloud data effectively, the association rule mining algorithm has been extended with temporal constraints in this work in order to find the association among the attributes so that it is possible to form groups among the attributes as public attributes with insensitive data, group attributes with medium sensitive data and owner with highly sensitive attributes and data for enhancing the strength of attribute based encryption scheme. Based on the associations among the attributes and temporal constraints, it is possible to encrypt the sensitive data with stronger keys and algorithms. Hence, a new key generation and encryption algorithm is proposed in this paper by combining the Greatest common divisor and the Least common multiple between the primary key value and the first numeric non key attribute that is medium sensitive attributes and data present in the cloud database for providing secured storage through effective attribute based encryption. Moreover, a new intelligent algorithm called Elliptic Curve Cryptography with Base100 Table algorithm is also proposed in this paper for performing encryption and decryption operations over the most sensitive data for the data owners. From the experiments conducted in this work, it is observed that the proposed model enhances the data security by more than 5% when it is compared with other existing secured storage models available for cloud

On the representation of role-based access control models by object-oriented HRU model: taxonomic leaf-based hierarchy case

In this paper the possibility of representing of some types of role-based access control models by object-oriented discretionary access control model is considered. The role-based security models with taxonomic hierarchy are considered. The permissions of the role-based access control model are represented as a set of pairs of object and access right. A hierarchy of classes of the object-oriented HRU model, based on the role-based access control policy, is constructed. Commands of the object-oriented HRU model, corresponding to the reassignment of roles in the original role-based model, are described.

PRESTvO: PRivacy Enabled Smartphone Based Access to Vehicle On-Board Units

Smartphones are quickly moving toward complementing or even replacing traditional car keys. We advocate a role-based access control policy mixed with attributes that facilitates access to various functionalities of vehicular on-board units from smartphones. We use a rights-based access control policy for in-vehicle functionalities similar to the case of a file allocation table of a contemporary OS, in which read, write or execute operations can be performed over various vehicle functions. Further, to assure the appropriate security, we develop a protocol suite using identity-based cryptography and we rely on group signatures that preserve the anonymity of group members for assuring privacy and traceability. To prove the feasibility of our approach, we develop a proof-of-concept implementation with modern smartphones, aftermarket Android head-units and test computational feasibility on a real-world in-vehicle controller. Our implementation relies on state-of-the-art cryptography, including traditional building blocks and more modern pairing-friendly curves, that facilitate the adoption of group signatures and identity-based cryptography in automotive-based scenarios.

On the use of Max-SAT and PDDL in RBAC maintenance

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) policies are at the core of Cybersecurity as they ease the enforcement of basic security principles, e.g., Least Privilege and Separation of Duties. As ICT systems and business processes evolve, RBAC policies have to be updated to prevent unauthorised access to resources by capturing errors and misalignments between the current policy and reality. However, such update process is a human-intensive activity and it is expected to meet specific constraints. This paper proposes a semi-automatic RBAC maintenance process to fix and refine an RBAC state when “exceptions” and “violations” are detected. Exceptions are permissions some users realise they miss that are instrumental to their job and should be granted as soon as possible, while violations are permissions that have to be revoked since they are no longer required by their current owners. We propose a formalisation for the maintenance process which fixes single and multiple exceptions and violations by balancing two conflicting objectives, i.e., (i) optimising the current RBAC state, and (ii) reducing the transition cost. Our approach is based on a Max-SAT formalisation of the constraint-based optimisation problem, and on PDDL planning to define the transition strategy with minimum cost. Our implementation relies on incomplete Max-SAT solvers and satisficing PDDL planners which provide approximations of optimal solutions. Experiments along with a comparative evaluation show good performance on real-world benchmarks.

Cree: a Performant Tool for Safety Analysis of Administrative Temporal Role-Based Access Control (ATRBAC) Policies

Access control deals with the roles and privileges to which a user is authorized, and is an important aspect of the security of a system. As enterprise access control systems need to scale to several users, roles and privileges, it is common for access control models to support delegation: a trusted security administrator is able to give semi-trusted users the ability to change portions of the authorization state. With delegation comes the danger that semi-trusted users, perhaps in collusion, may effect a state that violates enterprise policy, which in turn results in the problem called safety analysis, which is regarded as a fundamental and technically challenging problem in access control. Safety analysis is used by a trusted security administrator to answer “what if” questions before she grants privileges to a semi-trusted user. Safety analysis has been studied for various access control schemes in the literature; we address safety analysis in the context of Administrative Temporal Role-Based Access Control (ATRBAC), an administrative model for TRBAC, which is an extension to the traditional RBAC. ATRBAC has new features, which introduce new technical challenges for safety analysis: (i) a time-dimension: two new components in each administrative rule that specify in which time periods an administrative action may be effected, and a user is authorized to a role, and, (ii) two new kinds of rules for whether a role is enabled for administrative action. We propose a software tool, which we call Cree, for safety analysis of ATRBAC policies. In Cree we reduce ATRBAC-Safety to model checking and use an off-the-shelf model checker, NuSMV. The foundation for Cree is the observation from our prior work that ATRBAC safety is PSPACE . Along with an efficient reduction to model checking, we include in Cree four techniques to further improve performance: Polynomial Time Solving when possible, Forward and Backwards Pruning, Abstraction Refinement, and Bound Estimation. These are inspired by prior work, but our algorithms are different in that they address the new challenges that ATRBAC introduces. We discuss our design of Cree, and the results of a thorough empirical assessment across our approach, and five other prior tools for ATRBAC safety. Our results suggest that there are input classes for which Cree outperforms existing tools, and for the remainder, Cree’s performance is no worse. We have made Cree available as open-source for public download.

An Algebraic Model to Analyze Role-Based Access Control Policies

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is a well known access control model used to preserve the confidentiality of information by specifying the ability of users to access information based on their roles. Usually these policies would be manipulated by combining or comparing them especially when defined in a distributed way. Furthermore, these policies should satisfy predefined authorization constraints.
 
 In this paper, we present an algebraic model for specifying and analyzing RBAC policies. The proposed model enables us to specify policies and verify the satisfaction of predefined authorization constraints. Furthermore, the model allows us to combine policies and analyze their effect on predefined constraints. The model consists of few operators that give simplicity in specifying polices. We present a prototype tool used for facilitating the analysis.

Role based access control design using three-way formal concept analysis

Role based access control (RBAC) is one of the popular access control models. On representing the policy behind RBAC, the literatures investigate the use of various knowledge representation techniques such as Descriptive logics, Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), Ontology etc. Based on the input of binary access control table, the existing knowledge representation techniques on RBAC derives two-way decisions whether to permit the access request or not. It works well when single element in the set of elements of a constituent of RBAC initiates the access request. Consider the scenario of multiple distinct elements in the set of elements of a constituent of RBAC initiate the collective access request to a set of elements in other constituent of RBAC. In many cases of this scenario, some elements possess but not all of the elements possess the permission to access all elements in other subset of a constituent of RBAC. On this situation, the collective access decision to those multiple distinct elements in the set of elements of a RBAC constituent appears in three forms such as permit, deny and non-commitment. Three-way formal concept analysis (3WCA) is an emerging knowledge representation technique which provides two types of three-way concepts and their lattices to enable three-way decisions from the binary information table. At this juncture, it is more suitable to apply 3WCA on representing the RBAC policy to enable three-way decisions instead of existing two-way decisions in classical FCA and triadic FCA. The main objective of this paper is to propose a methodology for modelling RBAC using 3WCA and attain its distinctive merits. Our discussion is on two lines of inquiry. We present on how 3WCA can provide suitable representation of RBAC policy and whether this representation follows role hierarchy and constraints of RBAC.

The Preliminary Investigation of SSO Protocol for the Suitability of Mission Critical Applications

Objective: Single Sign-On (SSO) mechanism mitigates the complexity by providing a single set of login credentials for disparate systems. The main objective of SSO in mission critical applications is to provide a most trusted authentication provider while ensuring the secured online service. Methods: Exploiting third party identity provider leads Open ID connect to not fit in banking services. Since traditional banking systems refuse to disclose the user-sensitive information to any third party, the conventional models lack in maintaining the consistent revocation model. However, the maintenance of user details at server needs to follow the consistent revocation model at all connected banks. The conventional SSO protocols follow different ways to develop the access control policies to recognize the user identity. However, the banking services need role-based access control policy. Findings: In order to provide the secure SSO to banking services, this work presents the extended Open ID connect protocol with additional security features which are more suitable to the online banking systems. The extended Open ID connect provides the role of identity provider to RBI which is a centralized authority to connect all the banks and their user accounts. It exploits the chaotic sequence encryption algorithm to dynamically manage the session, which facilitates the common revocation model. This restricts the impersonation, modification, and eavesdropping attacks while accessing the online banking services with SSO mechanism. The request identification and validation using random user ID in every subsequent page access ensures the security of the online transaction. Moreover, the request identification and validation using random user ID in every subsequent page access ensures the security of the online transaction. Application/Improvements: The proposed model tightens the security of Open ID connect with the support of Chaotic sequence encryption, common revocation model, and request identification. It successfully extends the usage of SSO to mission critical applications. Keywords: Banking Service, Chaotic Sequence Encryption, Open ID connect, Revocation, Identity Provider

Migrating from RBAC to temporal RBAC

The last two decades have witnessed an emergence of role-based access control (RBAC) as the de facto standard for access control. However, for organisations already having a deployed RBAC system, in many cases it may become necessary to associate a temporal dimension with the existing access control policies due to changing organisational requirements. In such cases, migration from RBAC to a temporal extension of RBAC becomes essential. Temporal RBAC (TRBAC) is one such RBAC extension. The process of creating a set of roles for implementing a TRBAC system is known as temporal role mining. Existing temporal role mining approaches typically assume that TRBAC is being deployed from scratch and do not consider it as a migration from an existing RBAC policy. In this study, the authors propose two temporal role mining approaches that enable migration from RBAC to TRBAC. These approaches make use of conventional (non-temporal) role mining algorithms. Apart from aiding the migration process, deriving the roles in this manner allows the flexibility of minimising any desired role mining metric. They experimentally evaluate the performance of both of the proposed approaches and show that they are both efficient and effective.

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.

A Secure Role-Based Cloud Storage System For Encrypted Patient-Centric Health Records

With the rapid developments occurring in cloud services, there has been a growing trend to use cloud for large-scale data storage. Due to the increasing popularity of cloud storage, many healthcare organizations have started moving electronic health records (EHRs) to cloud-based storage systems. However, this has raised the important security issue of how to protect and prevent unauthorized access to EHR data stored in a public cloud. Several cryptographic access control schemes have been proposed to protect the security of data stored in the cloud by integrating cryptographic techniques with access control models. In this paper, we consider a novel role-based encryption technique to build a secure and flexible large-scale EHR system where role-based access control policies are enforced in a cloud environment. Then we discuss a practical EHR system called the personally controlled electronic health record (PCEHR) system recently developed by the Australian Government, and show how the security weaknesses in the PCEHR system can be addressed by our proposed scheme. The proposed system has the potential to be useful in commercial healthcare systems as it captures practical access policies based on roles in a flexible manner and provides secure data storage in the cloud enforcing these access policies.

An Incremental B-Model for RBAC-Controlled Electronic Marking System

The incremental development of software through the addition of new features and the insertion of new access rules potentially renders the access control models inconsistent and creates security flaws. This paper proposes modeling Role Based Access Control (RBAC) models of these software using the B language and re-evaluating the consistency of the models following model changes. It shows the mechanism of formalizing RBAC policies of an Electronic Marking System (EMS) using B specifications and illustrates the verification of the consistency of the RBAC specification, using model checking and proof obligations. In addition, it shows how to address inconsistencies that result from incremental specification of system' architectures.

Mining Attribute-Based Access Control Policies

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) provides a high level of flexibility that promotes security and information sharing. ABAC policy mining algorithms have potential to significantly reduce the cost of migration to ABAC, by partially automating the development of an ABAC policy from an access control list (ACL) policy or role-based access control (RBAC) policy with accompanying attribute data. This paper presents an ABAC policy mining algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first ABAC policy mining algorithm. Our algorithm iterates over tuples in the given user-permission relation, uses selected tuples as seeds for constructing candidate rules, and attempts to generalize each candidate rule to cover additional tuples in the user-permission relation by replacing conjuncts in attribute expressions with constraints. Our algorithm attempts to improve the policy by merging and simplifying candidate rules, and then it selects the highest-quality candidate rules for inclusion in the generated policy.