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Security analysis in role-based access control

Authors:

Ninghui Li,

Mahesh V. TripunitaraAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC), Volume 9, Issue 4

Pages 391 - 420

https://doi.org/10.1145/1187441.1187442

Published: 01 November 2006 Publication History

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Abstract

The administration of large role-based access control (RBAC) systems is a challenging problem. In order to administer such systems, decentralization of administration tasks by the use of delegation is an effective approach. While the use of delegation greatly enhances flexibility and scalability, it may reduce the control that an organization has over its resources, thereby diminishing a major advantage RBAC has over discretionary access control (DAC). We propose to use security analysis techniques to maintain desirable security properties while delegating administrative privileges. We give a precise definition of a family of security analysis problems in RBAC, which is more general than safety analysis that is studied in the literature. We show that two classes of problems in the family can be reduced to similar analysis in the RT[↞∩] role-based trust-management language, thereby establishing an interesting relationship between RBAC and the RT framework. The reduction gives efficient algorithms for answering most kinds of queries in these two classes and establishes the complexity bounds for the intractable cases.

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Cited By

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Pratap Singh M(2023)Role of Access Control in Information Security: A Security Analysis ApproachInformation Security and Privacy in the Digital World - Some Selected Topics10.5772/intechopen.111371Online publication date: 27-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.111371
Du YZhou YHu H(2023)Dynamic Assignment of Roles and Users for Business Processes Under Security RequirementsIEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics10.1109/TII.2023.324056819:10(10344-10355)Online publication date: Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2023.3240568
Gupta MSandhu RMawla TBenson J(2023)Reachability Analysis for Attributes in ABAC With Group HierarchyIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2022.314535820:1(841-858)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2022.3145358
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Index Terms

Security analysis in role-based access control
1. Security and privacy
  1. Security services
    1. Access control
  2. Systems security
    1. Operating systems security
2. Social and professional topics
  1. Computing / technology policy
    1. Computer crime

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Reviews

Reviewer: George R. Mayforth

Role-based access control (RBAC) permits an organization to define a role as being associated with specific resources. When individuals are assigned to a role, they are provided access to that role's resources. This aggregation of permissions simplifies administration compared to discretionary access control (DAC), wherein access is granted on a per-resource basis. In large organizations with large numbers of people and resources, DAC can be quite labor intensive, which motivates interest in and investigations of RBAC. As might be expected, there are tradeoffs to consider when RBAC is employed. In large organizations, it is normal to delegate administration fairly widely. This presents the problem of verifying that delegations in an RBAC system do not interfere with each other, and unintentionally violate the security that RBAC is trying to enforce. This paper provides a mathematical definition of two classes of problems in RBAC, and uses it to reduce analysis of the classes to equivalent analyses in RT, a role-based trust management language. Because RT is designed to enforce consistent security policies regarding access control, the reduction permits rigorous analysis of the two classes of RBAC problems. To quote the authors: "The reduction gives efficient algorithms for answering most kinds of queries in these two classes and establishes the complexity bounds for the intractable cases." This work takes an important step toward a rigorous understanding of the security analysis of RBAC. It is, however, only a starting point. The authors point out areas that could be studied in future efforts. The paper is clearly written, and provides detailed proofs of its major assertions. It should be of interest to researchers and implementers in this field.

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Published In

ACM Transactions on Information and System Security Volume 9, Issue 4

November 2006

96 pages

ISSN:1094-9224

EISSN:1557-7406

DOI:10.1145/1187441

Issue’s Table of Contents

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 November 2006

Published in TISSEC Volume 9, Issue 4

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Pratap Singh M(2023)Role of Access Control in Information Security: A Security Analysis ApproachInformation Security and Privacy in the Digital World - Some Selected Topics10.5772/intechopen.111371Online publication date: 27-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.111371
Du YZhou YHu H(2023)Dynamic Assignment of Roles and Users for Business Processes Under Security RequirementsIEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics10.1109/TII.2023.324056819:10(10344-10355)Online publication date: Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2023.3240568
Gupta MSandhu RMawla TBenson J(2023)Reachability Analysis for Attributes in ABAC With Group HierarchyIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2022.314535820:1(841-858)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2022.3145358
Sándor BRajnai Z(2023)Smart Building IoT Cybersecurity: A Review of Threats and Mitigation Technique2023 IEEE 21st Jubilee International Symposium on Intelligent Systems and Informatics (SISY)10.1109/SISY60376.2023.10417954(000321-000326)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2023
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Long DWang JHan BChen DShi L(2023)MS-UCON: A Usage Control Model for Meteorological Operational Systems2023 19th International Conference on Natural Computation, Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery (ICNC-FSKD)10.1109/ICNC-FSKD59587.2023.10281006(1-6)Online publication date: 29-Jul-2023
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Deng XLi BZhang SDeng L(2023)Blockchain-based dynamic trust access control game mechanismJournal of King Saud University - Computer and Information Sciences10.1016/j.jksuci.2023.01.01035:2(702-725)Online publication date: Feb-2023
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Truong A(2023)Efficient Analysis of Sequences of Security Problems in Access Control SystemsMobile Computing and Sustainable Informatics10.1007/978-981-99-0835-6_5(67-80)Online publication date: 27-May-2023
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Jaimunk J(2023)The Analysis of Security Properties for Dynamic Privacy-Policy in Data Collection and Access ControlAdvances in Systems Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-40579-2_17(175-182)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2023
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Parkinson SKhan S(2022)A Survey on Empirical Security Analysis of Access-control Systems: A Real-world PerspectiveACM Computing Surveys10.1145/353370355:6(1-28)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2022
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Guo QTripunitara MDietrich SChowdhury OTakabi D(2022)The Secrecy Resilience of Access Control Policies and Its Application to Role MiningProceedings of the 27th ACM on Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies10.1145/3532105.3535030(115-126)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2022
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