A Unified Framework for Enforcing Multiple Access Control Policies

Abstract

Although several access control policies can be devised for controlling access to information, all existing authorization models, and the corresponding enforcement mechanisms, are based on a specific policy (usually the closed policy). As a consequence, although different policy choices are possible in theory, in practice only a specific policy can be actually applied within a given system. However, protection requirements within a system can vary dramatically, and no single policy may simultaneously satisfy them all. In this paper we present a flexible authorization manager (FAM) that can enforce multiple access control policies within a single, unified system. FAM is based on a language through which users can specify authorizations and access control policies to be applied in controlling execution of specific actions on given objects. We formally define the language and properties required to hold on the security specifications and prove that this language can express all security specifications. Furthermore, we show that all programs expressed in this language (called FAM/CAM-programs) are also guaranteed to be consistent (i.e., no conflicting access decisions occur) and CAM-programs are complete (i.e., every access is either authorized or denied). We then illustrate how several well-known protection policies proposed in the literature can be expressed in the FAM/CAM language and how users can customize the access control by specifying their own policies. The result is an access control mechanism which is flexible, since different access control policies can all coexist in the same data system, and extensible, since it can be augmented with any new policy a specific application or user may require