Flexible team-based access control using contexts

  • Authors:
  • Christos K. Georgiadis;Ioannis Mavridis;George Pangalos;Roshan K. Thomas

  • Affiliations:
  • Aristotle Univ. of Thessaloniki, Greece;Aristotle Univ. of Thessaloniki, Greece;Aristotle Univ. of Thessaloniki, Greece;NAI Labs., McLean, VA

  • Venue:
  • SACMAT '01 Proceedings of the sixth ACM symposium on Access control models and technologies
  • Year:
  • 2001

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We discuss the integration of contextual information with team-based access control. The TMAC model was formulated by Thomas in [1] to provide access control for collaborative activity best accomplished by teams of users. In TMAC, access control revolves around teams, where a "team" is an abstraction that encapsulates a collection of users in specific roles and collaborating with the objective of accomplishing a specific task or goal. Users who belong to a team are given access to resources used by a team. However, the effective permissions of a user are always derived from permission types defined for roles that the user belongs to. TMAC is an example of what we call "active security models". These models are aware of the context associated with an ongoing activity in providing access control and thus distinguish the passive concept of permission assignment from the active concept of context-based permission activation. The ability to integrate contextual information allows models such as TMAC to be flexible and express a variety of access policies that can provide tight and just-in-time permission activation.