XML access control using static analysis

  • Authors:
  • Makoto Murata;Akihiko Tozawa;Michiharu Kudo;Satoshi Hada

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM Tokyo Research Lab, Kanagawa-ken, Japan;IBM Tokyo Research Lab, Kanagawa-ken, Japan;IBM Tokyo Research Lab, Kanagawa-ken, Japan;IBM Tokyo Research Lab, Kanagawa-ken, Japan

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC)
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Access control policies for XML typically use regular path expressions such as XPath for specifying the objects for access-control policies. However such access-control policies are burdens to the query engines for XML documents. To relieve this burden, we introduce static analysis for XML access-control. Given an access-control policy, query expression, and an optional schema, static analysis determines if this query expression is guaranteed not to access elements or attributes that are hidden by the access-control policy but permitted by the schema. Static analysis can be performed without evaluating any query expression against actual XML documents. Run-time checking is required only when static analysis is unable to determine whether to grant or deny access requests. A side effect of static analysis is query optimization: access-denied expressions in queries can be evaluated to empty lists at compile time. We further extend static analysis for handling value-based access-control policies and introduce view schemas.