A Distributed Calculus for Role-Based Access Control

Role-based access control (RBAC) is increasingly attracting attention because it reduces the complexity and cost of security administration by interposing the notion of role in the assignment of permissions to users. In this paper, we present a formal framework relying on an extension of the π calculus to study the behavior of concurrent systems in a RBAC scenario. We define a type system ensuring that the specified policy is respected during computations, and a bisimulation to equate systems. The theory is then applied to three meaningful examples, namely finding the ‘minimal’ policy to run a given system, refining a system to be run under a given policy (whenever possible), and minimizing the number of users in a given system without changing the overall behavior

Access Control Design and Implementations in the ATLAS Experiment

The ATLAS experiment operates with a significant number of hardware and software resources. Their protection against misuse is an essential task to ensure a safe and optimal operation. To achieve this goal, the Role Based Access Control (RBAC) model has been chosen for its scalability, flexibility, ease of administration and usability from the lowest operating system level to the highest software application level. This paper presents the overall design of RBAC implementation in the ATLAS experiment and the enforcement solutions in different areas such as the system administration, control room desktops and the data acquisition software. The users and the roles are centrally managed using a directory service based on Lightweight Directory Access Protocol which is kept in synchronization with the human resources and IT data

Securing Controls Middleware of the Large Hadron Collider

The distributed control system of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) presents many challenges due to its inherent heterogeneity and highly dynamic nature. One critical challenge is providing access control guarantees within the middleware. Role-based access control (RBAC) is a good candidate to provide access control. However, in an equipment control system transactions are often dependent on user context and device context. Unfortunately, classic RBAC cannot be used to handle the above requirements. In this paper we present an extended role-based access control model called CMW-RBAC. This new model incorporates the advantages of role-based permission administration together with a fine-grained control of dynamic context attributes. We also propose a new technique called dynamic authorization that allows phased introduction of access control in large distributed systems. This paper also describes motivation of the project, requirements, and overview of its main components: authentication and authorization

Extended RBAC with role attributes

Though RBAC has been researched for many years as a current dominant access control technology, there are few researches to be done to address the further extension of the role which is the fundamental entity of RBAC. This paper tries to extend the role to a further level, the role attributes. Through the attributes, the function and operation on the role can be enhanced and extended. Through the attributes, ANSI RBAC is significantly extended. In the inheritance of hierarchical role, the privacy of its parental role can be kept by using HA (Hidden Attribute)

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

ESPOONERBAC_{{ERBAC}}: Enforcing Security Policies In Outsourced Environments

Data outsourcing is a growing business model offering services to individuals and enterprises for processing and storing a huge amount of data. It is not only economical but also promises higher availability, scalability, and more effective quality of service than in-house solutions. Despite all its benefits, data outsourcing raises serious security concerns for preserving data confidentiality. There are solutions for preserving confidentiality of data while supporting search on the data stored in outsourced environments. However, such solutions do not support access policies to regulate access to a particular subset of the stored data. For complex user management, large enterprises employ Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) models for making access decisions based on the role in which a user is active in. However, RBAC models cannot be deployed in outsourced environments as they rely on trusted infrastructure in order to regulate access to the data. The deployment of RBAC models may reveal private information about sensitive data they aim to protect. In this paper, we aim at filling this gap by proposing \textbf{$\mathit{ESPOON_{ERBAC}}$} for enforcing RBAC policies in outsourced environments. $\mathit{ESPOON_{ERBAC}}$ enforces RBAC policies in an encrypted manner where a curious service provider may learn a very limited information about RBAC policies. We have implemented $\mathit{ESPOON_{ERBAC}}$ and provided its performance evaluation showing a limited overhead, thus confirming viability of our approach.Comment: The final version of this paper has been accepted for publication in Elsevier Computers & Security 2013. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1306.482

Refinement for Administrative Policies

Flexibility of management is an important requisite for access control systems as it allows users to adapt the access control system in accordance with practical requirements. This paper builds on earlier work where we defined administrative policies for a general class of RBAC models. We present a formal definition of administrative refinnement and we show that there is an ordering for administrative privileges which yields administrative refinements of policies. We argue (by giving an example) that this privilege ordering can be very useful in practice, and we prove that the privilege ordering is tractable

CRiBAC: Community-centric role interaction based access control model

As one of the most efficient solutions to complex and large-scale problems, multi-agent cooperation has been in the limelight for the past few decades. Recently, many research projects have focused on context-aware cooperation to dynamically provide complex services. As cooperation in the multi-agent systems (MASs) becomes more common, guaranteeing the security of such cooperation takes on even greater importance. However, existing security models do not reflect the agents' unique features, including cooperation and context-awareness. In this paper, we propose a Community-based Role interaction-based Access Control model (CRiBAC) to allow secure cooperation in MASs. To do this, we refine and extend our preliminary RiBAC model, which was proposed earlier to support secure interactions among agents, by introducing a new concept of interaction permission, and then extend it to CRiBAC to support community-based cooperation among agents. We analyze potential problems related to interaction permissions and propose two approaches to address them. We also propose an administration model to facilitate administration of CRiBAC policies. Finally, we present the implementation of a prototype system based on a sample scenario to assess the proposed work and show its feasibility. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved