Distributed Access Control for Web and Business Processes

Middleware influenced the research community in developing a number of systems for controlling access to distributed resources. Nowadays a new paradigm for the lightweight integration of business resources from different partners is starting to take hold – Web Services and Business Processes for Web Services. Security and access control policies for Web Services protocols and distributed systems are well studied and almost standardized, but there is not yet a comprehensive proposal for an access control architecture for business processes. So, it is worth looking at the available approaches to distributed authorization as a starting point for a better understanding of what they already have and what they still need to address the security challenges for business processes

Research and Application of Access Control Technique in 3D Virtual Reality System OpenSim

Access control in 3-D virtual reality systems is a wide and still growing topic. A good access control model is a premise for data security, and makes the whole system play its functions reliably. We compare access control techniques in 3D system OpenSim with that of other virtual reality systems. By using a general extended scheme, we analyze the model and the rule of access control in OpenSim. In this scheme, we provide a method of expanding network services for special proposes. Meanwhile, it verifies the feasibility of developing OpenSim's services on the basis of data security

Bringing security home: A process for developing secure and usable systems

The aim of this paper is to provide better support for the development of secure systems. We argue that current development practice suffers from two key problems: 1. Security requirements tend to be kept separate from other system requirements, and not integrated into any overall strategy. 2. The impact of security measures on users and the operational cost of these measures on a day-to-day basis are usually not considered. Our new paradigm is the full integration of security and usability concerns into the software development process, thus enabling developers to build secure systems that work in the real world. We present AEGIS, a secure software engineering method which integrates asset identification, risk and threat analysis and context of use, bound together through the use of UML, and report its application to case studies on Grid projects. An additional benefit of the method is that the involvement of stakeholders in the high-level security analysis improves their understanding of security, and increases their motivation to comply with policies

How Users Bypass Access Control and Why: The Impact of Authorization Problems on Individuals and the Organization

Many organizations struggle with ineffective and/or inefficient access control, but these problems and their consequences often remain invisible to security decision-makers. Prior research has focused on improving the policy-authoring part of authorization and does not show the full range of problems, their impact on organizations, and underlying causes. We present a study of 118 individual's experiences of authorization measures in a multi-national company and their self-reported subsequent behavior. We follow the recent advances in applying economic models to security usability and analyze the interrelations of authorization issues with individuals' behaviors and organizational goals. Our results indicate that authorization problems significantly impact the productivity and effective security of organizations. From the data, we derive authorization Personas and their daily problems, which are to a large extent caused by the procedures for policy changes and the decision-making, and lead to the circumvention of the measure. As one research contribution, we develop a holistic model of authorization problems. More practically, we recommend to monitor non-compliance, such as password-sharing, for indications of authorization problems, and to establish light-weight procedures for policy changes with adequate degrees of centralization and formalization, and support for decision-making

A User-Centered, Modular Authorization Service Built on an RBAC Foundation

Psychological acceptability has been mentioned as a requirement for secure systems for as long as least privilege and fail safe defaults, but until now has been all but ignored in the actual design of secure systems. We place this principle at the center of our design for Adage, an authorization service for distributed applications. We employ usability design techniques to specify and test the features of our authorization language and the corresponding administrative GUI. Our testing results reinforce our initial design center and suggest directions for deployment of our authorization services. A modular architecture allows us to experiment with our design during short term integration, and evolve it for longer term exploration. An RBAC foundation enables coherent design of flexible authorization constraints and queries. We discuss lessons learned from the implementation of this service through a planned deployment in a context that must balance new research in risk management with dependencies on legacy services

Relating Declarative Semantics and Usability in Access Control

This thesis addresses the problem of usability in the context of administration of access control systems. We seek to relate the notion of declarative semantics, a recurring theme in research in access control, with usability. We adopt the concrete context of POSIX ACLs and the traditional interface for it that comprises two utilities getfacl and setfacl. POSIX ACLs are the de facto standard to which POSIX conformant systems such as Linux and OpenBSD adhere. The natural semantics of getfacl and setfacl is operational. By operational we mean that the semantics of these are speci ed procedurally. We have designed and implemented an alternate interface that we call askfacl whose natural semantics is declarative. Declarative semantics means "what you see is what it is." We also discuss our design of askfacl and articulate the following thesis that underlies our work: If the natural semantics of the interface for ACLs is declarative, then a user is able to more quickly, accurately and confidently, inspect and edit ACLs than if the semantics is operational. To validate our thesis we conducted a between participant human-subject usability study with 42 participants. The results of our study measurably demonstrate the goodness of declarative semantics in access control

Toward Usable Access Control for End-users: A Case Study of Facebook Privacy Settings

Many protection mechanisms in computer security are designed to enforce a configurable policy. The security policy captures high-level goals and intentions, and is managed by a policy author tasked with translating these goals into an implementable policy. In our work, we focus on access control policies where errors in the specified policy can result in the mechanism incorrectly denying a request to access a resource, or incorrectly allowing access to a resource that they should not have access to. Due to the need for correct policies, it is critical that organizations and individuals have usable tools to manage security policies. Policy management encompasses several subtasks including specifying the initial security policy, modifying an existing policy, and comprehending the effective policy. The policy author must understand the configurable options well enough to accurately translate the desired policy into the implemented policy. Specifying correct security policies is known to be a difficult task, and prior work has contributed policy authoring tools that are more usable than the prior art and other work has also shown the importance of the policy author being able to quickly understand the effective policy. Specifying a correct policy is difficult enough for technical users, and now, increasingly, end-users are being asked to make access control decisions in regard to who can access their personal data. We focus on the need for an access control mechanism that is usable for end-users. We investigated end-users who are already managing an access control policy, namely social network site (SNS) users. We first looked at how they manage the access control policy that defines who can access their shared content. We accomplish this by empirically evaluating how Facebook users utilize the available privacy controls to implement an access control policy for their shared content and found that many users have policies are inconsistent with their sharing intentions. Upon discovering that many participants claim they will not take corrective action in response to inconsistencies in their existing settings, we collected quantitative and qualitative data to measure whether SNS users are concerned with the accessibility of their shared content. After confirming that users do in fact care about who accesses their content, we hypothesize that we can increase the correctness of users' SNS privacy settings by introducing contextual information and specific guidance based on their preferences. We found that the combination of viewership feedback, a sequence of direct questions to audit the user's sharing preferences, and specific guidance motivates some users to modify their privacy settings to more closely approximate their desired settings. Our results demonstrate the weaknesses of ACL-based access control mechanisms, and also provide support that it is possible to improve the usability of such mechanisms. We conclude by outlining the implications of our results for the design of a usable access control mechanism for end-users

MAFTIA Conceptual Model and Architecture

This document builds on the work reported in MAFTIA deliverable D1. It contains a refinement of the MAFTIA conceptual model and a discussion of the MAFTIA architecture. It also introduces the work done in WP6 on verification and assessment of security properties, which is reported on in more detail in MAFTIA deliverable D