Security analysis in role-based access control

  • Authors:
  • Ninghui Li;Mahesh V. Tripunitara

  • Affiliations:
  • Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN;Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ninth ACM symposium on Access control models and technologies
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Delegation is often used in administrative models for Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) systems to decentralize administration tasks. While the use of delegation greatly enhances flexibility and scalability, it may reduce the control that an organization has over its resources, thereby diminishing a major advantage RBAC has over Discretionary Access Control(DAC). We propose to use security analysis techniques to maintain desirable security properties while delegating administrative privileges. We give a precise definition of a family of security analysis problems in RBAC, which is more general than safety analysis that is studied in the literature. We also show that two classes of problems in the family can be reduced to similar analysis in the RT0 trust-management language, thereby establishing an interesting relationship between RBAC and the RT (Role-based Trust-management) framework. The reduction gives efficient algorithms for answering most kinds of queries in these two classes and establishes the complexity bounds for the intractable cases.