Approaches to access control policy comparison and the inter-domain role mapping problem

Abstract

The requirement to develop an organization makes collaboration with other organizations necessary, so the organizations can share resources to perform common tasks. Different organizational domains use different access control models to protect their resources from unauthorized access. Organizational collaboration is an important goal for distributed computing paradigms, but policy inconsistencies between domains will cause problems in a collaboration model that add to the problems involved in constructing the collaboration model itself. These problems provide the two challenges that motivate the research presented here: (1) the construction of a collaboration model across multiple domains protected by different access control models; and (2) ensuring that the access control policy used by a participating domain contains no inconsistencies; (3) we also present our new approach to solving the inter-domain role mapping (IDRM) problem, i.e., to determine the minimal role set that covers requested permissions from a collaborating domain. We also analyse our algorithms, present the results of our tests, and compare our results with the results of existing approaches.

Towards a Secure and Borderless Collaboration between Organizations: An Automated Enforcement Mechanism

“…Authors in [12] address the heterogeneity problem of access control models across collaborating organizations. They proposed an equivalent based access collaboration model EABC to protect shared resources.…”

“…Other works have assumed that collaborating organizations are adopting the same access control model and proposed centralized solutions like [8,9] or distributed solutions like [10,11] to control access cross-organizations. Few works have tackled the heterogeneity of access control models problem [12][13][14], and none of them according to our knowledge has given a complete solution for automatic policy mapping between heterogeneous systems that covers both syntactic and semantic transformation.…”

Towards the Formal Development of Software Based Systems: Access Control System as a Case Study

“…In addition, access control systems (ACS) are mostly used as a measure to restrict the access to sensitive data, specific areas, personal account information as well as to protect valuables. At the same time, the access control policies play an important role in distributed systems, such as the case of organizational collaboration, in order to prevent the organization's shared resources (machines and servers) from any unauthorized use or access [49]. The presence of ACS in our daily life brings forth many software security related challenges to protect both individual privacy and enterprise property through commerce and industry.…”