The Typed Access Matrix Model

  • Authors:
  • Ravi S. Sandhu

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • SP '92 Proceedings of the 1992 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
  • Year:
  • 1992

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Abstract

The access matrix model as formalized by Harrison,Ruzzo, and Unman (HRU) has broad expressivepower. Unfortunately, HRU has weak safety properties(i.e., the determination of whether or not a givensubject can ever acquire access to a given object).Most security policies of practical interest fall into theundecidable cases of HRU. This is true even for monotonicpolicies (i.e., where access rights can be deletedonly if the deletion is itself reversible). In this paperwe define the typed access matrix (TAM) model by introducing strong typing into HRU (i.e., each subjector object is created to be of a particular type whichthereafter does not change). We prove that monotonicTAM (MTAM) has strong safety properties similarto Sandhu's Schematic Protection Model. Safety inMTAM's decidable case is, however, NP-hard. We developa model called ternary MTAM which has polynomialsafety for its decidable case, and which neverthelessretains the full expressive power of MTAM. There is compelling evidence that the decidable safety cases of ternary MTAM are quite adequate for modelingpractical monotonic security policies.