Self-Adaptive Role-Based Access Control for Business Processes

© 2017 IEEE. We present an approach for dynamically reconfiguring the role-based access control (RBAC) of information systems running business processes, to protect them against insider threats. The new approach uses business process execution traces and stochastic model checking to establish confidence intervals for key measurable attributes of user behaviour, and thus to identify and adaptively demote users who misuse their access permissions maliciously or accidentally. We implemented and evaluated the approach and its policy specification formalism for a real IT support business process, showing their ability to express and apply a broad range of self-adaptive RBAC policies

V-Model Role Engineering

The paper focuses on role engineering which is an important topic in the development of access control system, particularly when considering Role Based Access Control – RBAC models. Despite the wide use of RBAC in various applications, the role engineering process is not a standardized approach. The paper aims to define a methodology and a process model for role engineeringInformation security, access control systems, role based access control systems – RBAC, engineering methodologies, security policies, access control models

Possibilistic Information Flow Control for Workflow Management Systems

In workflows and business processes, there are often security requirements on both the data, i.e. confidentiality and integrity, and the process, e.g. separation of duty. Graphical notations exist for specifying both workflows and associated security requirements. We present an approach for formally verifying that a workflow satisfies such security requirements. For this purpose, we define the semantics of a workflow as a state-event system and formalise security properties in a trace-based way, i.e. on an abstract level without depending on details of enforcement mechanisms such as Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). This formal model then allows us to build upon well-known verification techniques for information flow control. We describe how a compositional verification methodology for possibilistic information flow can be adapted to verify that a specification of a distributed workflow management system satisfies security requirements on both data and processes.Comment: In Proceedings GraMSec 2014, arXiv:1404.163

Analyzing temporal role based access control models

Today, Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is the de facto model used for advanced access control, and is widely deployed in diverse enterprises of all sizes. Several extensions to the authorization as well as the administrative models for RBAC have been adopted in recent years. In this paper, we consider the temporal extension of RBAC (TRBAC), and develop safety analysis techniques for it. Safety analysis is essential for understanding the implications of security policies both at the stage of specification and modification. Towards this end, in this paper, we first define an administrative model for TRBAC. Our strategy for performing safety analysis is to appropriately decompose the TRBAC analysis problem into multiple subproblems similar to RBAC. Along with making the analysis simpler, this enables us to leverage and adapt existing analysis techniques developed for traditional RBAC. We have adapted and experimented with employing two state of the art analysis approaches developed for RBAC as well as tools developed for software testing. Our results show that our approach is both feasible and flexible

Finding Security Bugs in Web Applications using a Catalog of Access Control Patterns

We propose a specification-free technique for finding missing security checks in web applications using a catalog of access control patterns in which each pattern models a common access control use case. Our implementation, Space, checks that every data exposure allowed by an application's code matches an allowed exposure from a security pattern in our catalog. The only user-provided input is a mapping from application types to the types of the catalog; the rest of the process is entirely automatic. In an evaluation on the 50 most watched Ruby on Rails applications on Github, Space reported 33 possible bug--|23 previously unknown security bugs, and 10 false positives.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 0707612

Benefits of Location-Based Access Control:A Literature Study

Location-based access control (LBAC) has been suggested as a means to improve IT security. By 'grounding' users and systems to a particular location, \ud attackers supposedly have more difficulty in compromising a system. However, the motivation behind LBAC and its potential benefits have not been investigated thoroughly. To this end, we perform a structured literature review, and examine the goals that LBAC can potentially fulfill, \ud the specific LBAC systems that realize these goals and the context on which LBAC depends. Our paper has four main contributions:\ud first we propose a theoretical framework for LBAC evaluation, based on goals, systems and context. Second, we formulate and apply criteria for evaluating the usefulness of an LBAC system. Third, we identify four usage scenarios for LBAC: open areas and systems, hospitals, enterprises, and finally data centers and military facilities. Fourth, we propose directions for future research:\ud (i) assessing the tradeoffs between location-based, physical and logical access control, (ii) improving the transparency of LBAC decision making, and \ud (iii) formulating design criteria for facilities and working environments for optimal LBAC usage

On Properties of Policy-Based Specifications

The advent of large-scale, complex computing systems has dramatically increased the difficulties of securing accesses to systems' resources. To ensure confidentiality and integrity, the exploitation of access control mechanisms has thus become a crucial issue in the design of modern computing systems. Among the different access control approaches proposed in the last decades, the policy-based one permits to capture, by resorting to the concept of attribute, all systems' security-relevant information and to be, at the same time, sufficiently flexible and expressive to represent the other approaches. In this paper, we move a step further to understand the effectiveness of policy-based specifications by studying how they permit to enforce traditional security properties. To support system designers in developing and maintaining policy-based specifications, we formalise also some relevant properties regarding the structure of policies. By means of a case study from the banking domain, we present real instances of such properties and outline an approach towards their automatised verification.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2015, arXiv:1508.0338