A relational database integrity framework for access control policies

Abstract

Access control is one of the most common and versatile mechanisms used for information systems security enforcement. An access control model formally describes how to decide whether an access request should be granted or denied. Since the rolebased access control initiative has been proposed in the 90s, several access control models have been studied in the literature. An access control policy is an instance of a model. It denes the set of basic facts used in the decision process. Policies must satisfy a set of constraints dened in the model, which reect some high level organization requirements. First-order logic has been advocated for some time as a suitable framework for access control models. Many frameworks have been proposed, focusing mainly on expressing complex access control models. However, though formally expressed, constraints are not dened in a unied language that could lead to some well-founded and generic enforcement procedures. Therefore, we make a clear distinction by proposing a logical framework focusing primarily on constraints, while keeping as much as possible a unied way of expressing constraints, policies, models, and reference monitors. This framework is closely tied to relational database integrity models. We then show how to use well-founded procedures in order to enforce and check constraints. Without requiring any rewriting previous to the inference process, these procedures provide clean and intuitive debugging traces for administrators. This approach is a step toward bridging the gap between general but hard to maintain formalisms and eective but insuciently general ones.

A Methodology and Toolkit for Deploying Reliable Security Policies in Critical Infrastructures

“…As regards the verification of concrete policies, several research studies fit into this topic with a main goal of verifying the correctness of the implementation regarding the set of predefined constraints. The basic contributions deal with (i) checking the validity of the implemented policy in comparison to its security constraints [40] by using a finite model checker; (ii) detecting anomalies of redundancy and inconsistency in the expression of the policy [41] by utilizing the concept of graph of roles; and (iii) proposing [42] a logical framework used to set and check policy constraints in the case of relational databases. To detect possible intrusions that may threaten an access control system, the author in [43] proposed to model the policy as a graph of roles and to use algorithms of graph theory or LDAP directory schema, to detect illicit transfer of privileges.…”

A Formal Approach Based on Verification and Validation Techniques for Enhancing the Integrity of Concrete Role Based Access Control Policies

“…Authors in [11] chose to transform the specification to the B notation using the B4Msecure tool and to analyze it with the ProB tool. Authors in [14] defined a logical framework to enforce the integrity of access control policies in relational databases. This framework focuses primarily on how to enforce and check constraints.…”

“…We define renamed users in (14) as the set of couple of users (U i , U j ); where U i is a missed user, U j is a hidden user and both users share the same permissions and roles:…”

Improving Data Access Security by Server-Side Functional Extensions

“…Simultaneous use of different roles can lead to violations of data security. An important limitation of this risk is transferring the rules of secure data access to the database server level [22].…”