AUTOMATING PERIODIC ROLE-CHECKS A TOOL-BASED APPROACH

The use of roles in Identity Management has proven to be a solution for reorganising and securing the access structures of organisations. One critical challenge companies face after they implemented roles is the maintenance of the role system itself. This includes sophisticated duties like periodically verifying the valid roles. We argue that due to the high complexity, periodic rolechecks need to be automated. However, as a result of lacking theoretical foundation, no approaches to leverage the level automation have been published so far. In this work we develop a catalogue of use cases that affect the role definitions within an organisation. We propose checkROLE, a tool for automated role-checking on basis of the defined use case catalogue

Author's personal copy Roles in information security e A survey and classification of the research area

Motivation The growing diffusion of information technologies within all areas of human society has increased their importance as a critical success factor in the modern world. However, information processing systems are vulnerable to many different kinds of threats that can lead to various types of damage resulting in significant economic losses. Consequently, the importance of Information Security has grown and evolved in a similar manner. In its most basic definition, Information Security means protecting information and information systems from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or destruction. The aim of Information Security is to minimize risks related to the three main security goals confidentiality, integrity, and availability e usually referred to as "CIA" c o m p u t e r s & s e c u r i t y 3 0 ( 2 0 1 1 ) 7 4 8 e7 6 9 0167-4048/$ e see front matter

An Access Control and Trust Management Framework for Loosely-Coupled Multidomain Environment

Multidomain environments where multiple organizations interoperate with each other are becoming a reality as can be seen in emerging Internet-based enterprise applications. Access control to ensure secure interoperation in such an environment is a crucial challenge. A multidomain environment can be categorized as tightly-coupled and loosely-coupled. The access control challenges in the loosely-coupled environment have not been studied adequately in the literature. In a loosely-coupled environment, different domains do not know each other before they interoperate. Therefore, traditional approaches based on users' identities cannot be applied directly. Motivated by this, researchers have developed several attribute-based authorization approaches to dynamically build trust between previously unknown domains. However, these approaches all focus on building trust between individual requesting users and the resource providing domain. We demonstrate that such approaches are inefficient when the requests are issued by a set of users assigned to a functional role in the organization. Moreover, preserving principle of security has long been recognized as a challenging problem when facilitating interoperations. Existing research work has mainly focused on solving this problem only in a tightly-coupled environment where a global policy is used to preserve the principle of security. In this thesis, we propose a role-based access control and trust management framework for loosely-coupled environments. In particular, we allow the users to specify the interoperation requests in terms of requested permissions and propose several role mapping algorithms to map the requested permissions into roles in the resource providing domain. Then, we propose a Simplify algorithm to simplify the distributed proof procedures when a set of requests are issued according to the functions of some roles in the requesting domain. Our experiments show that our Simplify algorithm significantly simplifies such procedures when the total number of credentials in the environment is sufficiently large, which is quite common in practical applications. Finally, we propose a novel policy integration approach using the special semantics of hybrid role hierarchy to preserve the principle of security. At the end of this dissertation a brief discussion of implemented prototype of our framework is present

Secure collaboration in onboarding

The process of onboarding a company is characterized by inter-enterprise collaboration between the acquiring and the acquired companies. Multiple cross-functional teams are formed to assimilate and integrate the processes, products, data, customers, and partners of the company under acquisition. Dynamic access control management in such inter-enterprise collaboration is the subject of this thesis. A problem in inter-enterprise collaboration in onboarding is that information assets shared by collaborating teams are not adequately protected. As a result, there is potential for accidental or malicious leakage of sensitive business information like the intellectual property, product roadmaps and strategy, customer lists etc. Also, the statically defined access control policies are not sufficient to address access control requirements of dynamic collaboration where there is a constant change in people, processes, and information assets in collaboration repository. This research proposes a new approach and model to integrate security in onboarding collaboration process. Research methods such as, literature review, field studies including direct experiential projects in onboarding and interviews with experts in Mergers and Acquisitions, and detailed data collection and analysis through surveys are used to identify the issues that need to be addressed in the onboarding process. Literature review enabled the identification of access control requirements from the perspective of statically defined policies and the need to determine access dynamically. From the field studies, it was deciphered that there is a need for a well-defined onboarding collaboration process. The data analysis and interpretation from the survey results provided insights into the needs for integrating security in all phases of onboarding collaboration. All these research methods essentially enabled identification of two key issues that this research addresses: 1) well-defined onboarding collaboration process and 2) building security in all phases of onboarding collaboration. A new approach and model called SCODA is developed to integrate security in all phases of onboarding collaboration. Onboarding collaboration process consists of four phases: create, operate, dissolve, and archive. These phases provide the basis for systematically addressing security and access control when the collaboration team is formed, while it is operating, when the team is dissolved after completing its tasks, and when shared information assets are archived. The research adapts role based access control (RBAC) and formally defines the enterprise, functional, and collaboration roles for making access control management decisions. New ideas are developed in trustbased access control management in dynamic collaboration. The change management aspects are also discussed. The SCODA model is validated and the refinements incorporated accordingly. This research contributed to both theory and practice of information security in general and access control in particular in the context of dynamic collaboration. It proposed a new approach of building security in, i.e. to integrate security in all phases of collaboration. In order to build security in, a new onboarding collaboration process is developed that is adaptable and customizable. It has also developed a new approach for trust based dynamic access control based on the new concepts of strong and weak trust relationships. These trust relationships are also adaptable and customizable. Finally, this research has potential for future research work in the design and implementation of multi-paradigm based enterprise security frameworks and interenterprise collaboration