TY - GEN
T1 - Policy analysis for administrative role based access control
AU - Sasturkar, Amit
AU - Yang, Ping
AU - Stoller, Scott D.
AU - Ramakrishnan, C. R.
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is a widely used model for expressing access control policies. In large organizations, the RBAC policy may be collectively managed by many administrators. Administrative RBAC (ARBAC) is a model for expressing the authority of administrators, thereby specifying how an organization's RBAC policy may change. Changes by one administrator may interact in unintended ways with changes by other administrators. Consequently, the effect of an ARBAC policy is hard to understand by simple inspection. In this paper, we consider the problem of analyzing ARBAC policies, in particular to determine reachability properties (e.g., whether a user can eventually be assigned to a role by a group of administrators) and availability properties (e.g., whether a user cannot be removed from a role by a group of administrators) implied by a policy. We first establish the connection between security policy analysis and planning in Artificial Intelligence. Based partly on this connection, we show that reachability analysis for ARBAC is PSPACE-complete. We also give algorithms and complexity results for reachability and related analysis problems for several categories of ARBAC policies, defined by simple restrictions on the policy language.
AB - Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is a widely used model for expressing access control policies. In large organizations, the RBAC policy may be collectively managed by many administrators. Administrative RBAC (ARBAC) is a model for expressing the authority of administrators, thereby specifying how an organization's RBAC policy may change. Changes by one administrator may interact in unintended ways with changes by other administrators. Consequently, the effect of an ARBAC policy is hard to understand by simple inspection. In this paper, we consider the problem of analyzing ARBAC policies, in particular to determine reachability properties (e.g., whether a user can eventually be assigned to a role by a group of administrators) and availability properties (e.g., whether a user cannot be removed from a role by a group of administrators) implied by a policy. We first establish the connection between security policy analysis and planning in Artificial Intelligence. Based partly on this connection, we show that reachability analysis for ARBAC is PSPACE-complete. We also give algorithms and complexity results for reachability and related analysis problems for several categories of ARBAC policies, defined by simple restrictions on the policy language.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/33947695249
U2 - 10.1109/CSFW.2006.22
DO - 10.1109/CSFW.2006.22
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:33947695249
SN - 0769526152
SN - 9780769526157
T3 - Proceedings of the Computer Security Foundations Workshop
SP - 133
EP - 138
BT - Proceedings - 19th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop, CSFW 2006
PB - IEEE Computer Society
T2 - 19th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop, CSFW 2006
Y2 - 5 July 2006 through 7 July 2006
ER -