Implementing Advanced RBAC Administration Functionality with USE

Role-based access control (RBAC) is a powerful means for laying out and developing higher-level organizational policies such as separation of duty, and for simplifying the security management process. One of the important aspects of RBAC is authorization constraints that express such organizational policies. While RBAC has generated a great interest in the security community, organizations still seek a flexible and effective approach to impose role-based authorization constraints in their security-critical applications. In particular, today often only basic RBAC concepts have found their way into commercial RBAC products; specifically, authorization constraints are not widely supported. In this paper, we present an RBAC administration tool that can enforce certain kinds of role-based authorization constraints such as separation of duty constraints. The authorization constraint functionality is based upon the OCL validation tool USE. We also describe our practical experience that we gained on integrating OCL functionality into a prototype of an RBAC administration tool that shall be extended to a product in the future

Hierarchical Group and Attribute-Based Access Control: Incorporating Hierarchical Groups and Delegation into Attribute-Based Access Control

Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) is a promising alternative to traditional models of access control (i.e. Discretionary Access Control (DAC), Mandatory Access Control (MAC) and Role-Based Access control (RBAC)) that has drawn attention in both recent academic literature and industry application. However, formalization of a foundational model of ABAC and large-scale adoption is still in its infancy. The relatively recent popularity of ABAC still leaves a number of problems unexplored. Issues like delegation, administration, auditability, scalability, hierarchical representations, etc. have been largely ignored or left to future work. This thesis seeks to aid in the adoption of ABAC by filling in several of these gaps. The core contribution of this work is the Hierarchical Group and Attribute-Based Access Control (HGABAC) model, a novel formal model of ABAC which introduces the concept of hierarchical user and object attribute groups to ABAC. It is shown that HGABAC is capable of representing the traditional models of access control (MAC, DAC and RBAC) using this group hierarchy and that in many cases it’s use simplifies both attribute and policy administration. HGABAC serves as the basis upon which extensions are built to incorporate delegation into ABAC. Several potential strategies for introducing delegation into ABAC are proposed, categorized into families and the trade-offs of each are examined. One such strategy is formalized into a new User-to-User Attribute Delegation model, built as an extension to the HGABAC model. Attribute Delegation enables users to delegate a subset of their attributes to other users in an off-line manner (not requiring connecting to a third party). Finally, a supporting architecture for HGABAC is detailed including descriptions of services, high-level communication protocols and a new low-level attribute certificate format for exchanging user and connection attributes between independent services. Particular emphasis is placed on ensuring support for federated and distributed systems. Critical components of the architecture are implemented and evaluated with promising preliminary results. It is hoped that the contributions in this research will further the acceptance of ABAC in both academia and industry by solving the problem of delegation as well as simplifying administration and policy authoring through the introduction of hierarchical user groups

Authorization schema for electronic health-care records: for Uganda

This thesis discusses how to design an authorization schema focused on ensuring each patient's data privacy within a hospital information system

TRADE-OFF ANALYSIS OF RELATIONAL DATABASE STORAGE FOR PRIVACY PURPOSES

In business organizations, person-specific data are collected as part of service re­ quirements from customers or data providers. To maintain the privacy of these per­ sonal data from intra-organizational or external unauthorized access, an Role-based access control (RBAC) extension with privacy purposes has been introduced. Re­ search on role-based access control and privacy has been conducted. Despite all this research, not much investigation into efficient ways to store person-specific data with privacy labels has been conducted. To the best of our knowledge, there is no such re­ search to analyze the characteristics and impact of different storage patterns on RBAC with privacy purposes. In this thesis, we propose some storage schemes for extended RBAC with privacy purpose in a relational database environment. Moreover, we ana­ lyze the performance characteristics and impact of different SQL operations according to different storage schemes for the extension of RBAC with privacy purposes

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

Oracle R12 EBusiness Suite Role Based Access Control and Roles Lifecycle Management

Oracle E-Business Suite R12 is a widely used ERP solution that provides integrated view of information across multiple functions and sources. It allows for simplified business process tools for Shared service model e.g. Centralized Operation where multiple operating units can be supported. Security considerations are vital for such operations in large enterprises. R12 introduced Role Based Access Control security based on ANSI RBAC standard. R12 RBAC implementation is challenged with lack of Roles Lifecycle Management (RLM) process which also contributes to challenges such as Segregation of duty (SOD), and controlling access to PII for multi-country operation for common functional areas. The paper will propose a possible Roles Lifecycle Management process.Comment: 8 pages, 14 figure

Steps towards adaptive situation and context-aware access: a contribution to the extension of access control mechanisms within pervasive information systems

L'évolution des systèmes pervasives a ouvert de nouveaux horizons aux systèmes d'information classiques qui ont intégré des nouvelles technologies et des services qui assurent la transparence d'accès aux resources d'information à n'importe quand, n'importe où et n'importe comment. En même temps, cette évolution a relevé des nouveaux défis à la sécurité de données et à la modélisation du contrôle d'accès. Afin de confronter ces challenges, differents travaux de recherche se sont dirigés vers l'extension des modèles de contrôles d'accès (en particulier le modèle RBAC) afin de prendre en compte la sensibilité au contexte dans le processus de prise de décision. Mais la liaison d'une décision d'accès aux contraintes contextuelles dynamiques d'un utilisateur mobile va non seulement ajouter plus de complexité au processus de prise de décision mais pourra aussi augmenter les possibilités de refus d'accès. Sachant que l'accessibilité est un élément clé dans les systèmes pervasifs et prenant en compte l'importance d'assurer l'accéssibilité en situations du temps réel, nombreux travaux de recherche ont proposé d'appliquer des mécanismes flexibles de contrôle d'accès avec des solutions parfois extrêmes qui depassent les frontières de sécurité telle que l'option de "Bris-de-Glace". Dans cette thèse, nous introduisons une solution modérée qui se positionne entre la rigidité des modèles de contrôle d'accès et la flexibilité qui expose des risques appliquées pendant des situations du temps réel. Notre contribution comprend deux volets : au niveau de conception, nous proposons PS-RBAC - un modèle RBAC sensible au contexte et à la situation. Le modèle réalise des attributions des permissions adaptatives et de solution de rechange à base de prise de décision basée sur la similarité face à une situation importanteÀ la phase d'exécution, nous introduisons PSQRS - un système de réécriture des requêtes sensible au contexte et à la situation et qui confronte les refus d'accès en reformulant la requête XACML de l'utilisateur et en lui proposant une liste des resources alternatives similaires qu'il peut accéder. L'objectif est de fournir un niveau de sécurité adaptative qui répond aux besoins de l'utilisateur tout en prenant en compte son rôle, ses contraintes contextuelles (localisation, réseau, dispositif, etc.) et sa situation. Notre proposition a été validé dans trois domaines d'application qui sont riches des contextes pervasifs et des scénarii du temps réel: (i) les Équipes Mobiles Gériatriques, (ii) les systèmes avioniques et (iii) les systèmes de vidéo surveillance.The evolution of pervasive computing has opened new horizons to classical information systems by integrating new technologies and services that enable seamless access to information sources at anytime, anyhow and anywhere. Meanwhile this evolution has opened new threats to information security and new challenges to access control modeling. In order to meet these challenges, many research works went towards extending traditional access control models (especially the RBAC model) in order to add context awareness within the decision-making process. Meanwhile, tying access decisions to the dynamic contextual constraints of mobile users would not only add more complexity to decision-making but could also increase the possibilities of access denial. Knowing that accessibility is a key feature for pervasive systems and taking into account the importance of providing access within real-time situations, many research works have proposed applying flexible access control mechanisms with sometimes extreme solutions that depass security boundaries such as the Break-Glass option. In this thesis, we introduce a moderate solution that stands between the rigidity of access control models and the riskful flexibility applied during real-time situations. Our contribution is twofold: on the design phase, we propose PS-RBAC - a Pervasive Situation-aware RBAC model that realizes adaptive permission assignments and alternative-based decision-making based on similarity when facing an important situation. On the implementation phase, we introduce PSQRS - a Pervasive Situation-aware Query Rewriting System architecture that confronts access denials by reformulating the user's XACML access request and proposing to him a list of alternative similar solutions that he can access. The objective is to provide a level of adaptive security that would meet the user needs while taking into consideration his role, contextual constraints (location, network, device, etc.) and his situation. Our proposal has been validated in three application domains that are rich in pervasive contexts and real-time scenarios: (i) Mobile Geriatric Teams, (ii) Avionic Systems and (iii) Video Surveillance Systems