An integrated approach to engineer and enforce context constraints in RBAC environments

Abstract

We present an approach that uses special purpose role-based access control (RBAC) constraints to base certain access control decisions on context information. In our approach a context constraint is defined as a dynamic RBAC constraint that checks the actual values of one or more contextual attributes for predefined conditions. If these conditions are satisfied, the corresponding access request can be permitted. Accordingly, a conditional permission is an RBAC permission that is constrained by one or more context constraints. We present an engineering process for context constraints that is based on goal-oriented requirements engineering techniques, and describe how we extended the design and implementation of an existing RBAC service to enable the enforcement of context constraints. With our approach we aim to preserve the advantages of RBAC and offer an additional means for the definition and enforcement of fine-grained context-dependent access control policies.

ESPOONERBAC: Enforcing security policies in outsourced environments

“…The RBAC model may activate a role or grant permissions while taking into account the context under which the user makes the access request or the role activation request [21,19,34,24,22]. The RBAC model captures this context by defining contextual conditions.…”

Modeling Interdependent Concern Behavior Using Extended Activity Models.

“…Context constraints define predicates that must evaluate to "true" in order to grant a certain access request. They allow for the consideration of context information in access decisions and enable the definition of additional conditions on permissions, like time constraints for example (for details see [19]). Our RBAC DSL provides the functionality of the xoRBAC component (see [13,19]) as an expressive language that separates the different concerns in this component.…”

“…They allow for the consideration of context information in access decisions and enable the definition of additional conditions on permissions, like time constraints for example (for details see [19]). Our RBAC DSL provides the functionality of the xoRBAC component (see [13,19]) as an expressive language that separates the different concerns in this component. To implement the RBAC DSL, we defined a domain-specific weaver component that is capable to weave the different concerns according to domain-specific restrictions.…”

Generic Algorithms for Consistency Checking of Mutual-Exclusion and Binding Constraints in a Business Process Context

“…programming language independent) consistency checks. In particular, the algorithms result from the experiences we gained in the analysis, design, and implementation of corresponding software systems and tools (see, e.g., [6,9,10,13,14,15,16]). …”

“…Our work complements previous contributions by providing generic algorithms and procedures to ensure the design-time and runtime consistency of process-related RBAC models. The algorithms result from our experiences in analyzing, designing, and implementing corresponding software systems (see, e.g., [9,10,13,14,15,16]). …”