Firewalls: A Balance Between Security and Accesibility

Access control lists and firewall rules are intended to prevent access to certain resources on a computer network while allowing access to other resources. Access control lists determine who has access to resources while firewall rules prevent general access to resources. The goal of this research is to find the best way to optimize a campus internet connection as well as a balance between the application of rules and lists and the accessibility of the outside world. This research is done utilizing a simulated internet and local network environment. The environment utilized simulates the set-up currently in use by an educational institution and will serve as a test environment upon completion of my research

RelBAC: Relation Based Access Control

TheWeb 2.0, GRID applications and, more recently, semantic desktop applications are bringing the Web to a situation where more and more data and metadata are shared and made available to large user groups. In this context, metadata may be tags or complex graph structures such as file system or web directories, or (lightweight) ontologies. In turn, users can themselves be tagged by certain properties, and can be organized in complex directory structures, very much in the same way as data. Things are further complicated by the highly unpredictable and autonomous dynamics of data, users, permissions and access control rules. In this paper we propose a new access control model and a logic, called RelBAC (for Relation Based Access Control) which allows us to deal with this novel scenario. The key idea, which differentiates RelBAC from the state of the art, e.g., Role Based Access Control (RBAC), is that permissions are modeled as relations between users and data, while access control rules are their instantiations on specific sets of users and objects. As such, access control rules are assigned an arity which allows a fine tuning of which users can access which data, and can evolve independently, according to the desires of the policy manager(s). Furthermore, the formalization of the RelBAC model as an Entity-Relationship (ER) model allows for its direct translation into Description Logics (DL). In turn, this allows us to reason, possibly at run time, about access control policies

Introducing Access Control in Webdamlog

We survey recent work on the specification of an access control mechanism in a collaborative environment. The work is presented in the context of the WebdamLog language, an extension of datalog to a distributed context. We discuss a fine-grained access control mechanism for intentional data based on provenance as well as a control mechanism for delegation, i.e., for deploying rules at remote peers.Comment: Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Database Programming Languages (DBPL 2013), August 30, 2013, Riva del Garda, Trento, Ital

Managing the Life Cycle of Access Rules in CEOSIS

The definition and management of access rules (e.g., to control the access to business documents and business functions) is an important task within any enterprise information systems (EIS). Many EIS apply role-based access control (RBAC) mechanisms to specify access rules based on organizational models. However, only little research has been spent on organizational changes even though they often become necessary in practice. Examples comprise the evolution of organizational models with subsequent adaptation of access rules or direct access rule modifications. In this paper, we present a change framework for the controlled evolution of access rules in EIS. Specifically, we define change operations which ensure correct modification of access rules. Finally, we define the formal semantics of access rule changes based on operator trees which enables their unambiguous application; i.e., we can precisely determine which effects are caused by respective adaptations. This is important, for example, to be able to efficiently adapt user worklists in process-aware information systems. Altogether this paper contributes to comprehensive life cycle support for access rules in (adaptive) EIS

Challenges in Model-Based Evolution and Merging of Access Control Policies

Access Control plays a crucial part in software security, as it is responsible for making sure that users have access to the resources they need while being forbidden from accessing resources they do not need. Access control models such as Role-Based Access Control have been developed to help system administrators deal with the increasing complexity of the rules that determine whether or not a particular user should access a particular resource. These rules, as well as the users and their needs, are likely to evolve over time. In some cases, it may even be necessary to merge several access control configurations into a single one. In this position paper, we review existing research in model-based software evolution and merging, and argue the need for a specific approach for access control in order to take its specific requirements into account