Formal definitions for usable access control rule sets from goals to metrics

Abstract

Access control policies describe high level requirements for access control systems. Access control rule sets ideally translate these policies into a coherent and manageable collection of Allow/Deny rules. Designing rule sets that reflect desired policies is a difficult and time-consuming task. The result is that rule sets are difficult to understand and manage. The goal of this paper is to provide means for obtaining usable access control rule sets, which we define as rule sets that (i) reflect the access control policy and (ii) are easy to understand and manage. In this paper, we formally define the challenges that users face when generating usable access control rule sets and provide formal tools to handle them more easily. We started our research with a pilot study in which specialists were interviewed. The objective was to list usability challenges regarding the management of access control rule sets and verify how those challenges were handled by specialists. The results of the pilot study were compared and combined with results from related work and refined into six novel, formally defined metrics that are used to measure the security and usability aspects of access control rule sets. We validated our findings with two user studies, which demonstrate that our metrics help users generate statistically significant better rule sets.

HCI Requirements for Transparency and Accountability Tools for Cloud Service Chains

“…Four experienced system administrators were then used to rank the results. This evaluation showed that the participants in the group that had the support from our formal tool, rule sets, and metrics performed significantly better than those in the group without this support (t(3.629) = 7.621, p = 0.007; details of this fourth experiment are published in Beckerle and Martucci [6]). …”

“…The actual research work has been reported in various publications and is not reported here (see esp. [4][5][6]. For a comprehensive summary, see A4Cloud Deliverable D-C.7.1 [1]).…”

“…Experiment 4: A between-subjects experiment design was deployed to gather evidence for the accuracy of the metrics proposed by Beckerle and Martucci [6]. This type of experiment was chosen because a control group was needed for comparing the results of the participants that were assisted by a tool that provided them with measurements regarding the security and usability of their access control rule sets with the results of the participants that didn't have such a support.…”

Introducing Dynamic Identity and Access Management in Organizations

“…Attribute management [6,8,16,20,35,37,52] in general deals with requirements related to the attributes used within ABAC policies, ranging from the aggregation of attributes up to their ongoing maintenance. Policy management [4,15,20,22,24,30,37] deals with the development and continuous improvement of access policies.…”

“…As a result, the establishment of design guidelines is mandatory in order to avoid semantically correct but inefficiently modeled and contradicting policies. Beckerle and Martucci [4] were the first to formally define security and manageability goals for policies. By means of such exemplary guidelines organizations can increase policy homogeneity and ease policy maintenance.…”