Formalizing XML access control for update operations

  • Authors:
  • Irini Fundulaki;Sebastian Maneth

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Edinburgh, UK;NICTA Ltd. and UNSW, Australia

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 12th ACM symposium on Access control models and technologies
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Several languages have been proposed over the past years which support the specification of access control on XML data. Most of these languages consider read-access restrictions only and do not deal with access rights for updates(such as add, delete, or modify operations). Fine-grain XML update operations are subject to current research. This paper proposes XACU, a language for specifying access control on XML data in the presence of update operations. The update operations used in XACU are based on the W3CX Query Update Facility working draft. A formal access control model is defined which allows to study properties of XACU access policies. One essential property is consistency the policy should not allow the execution of a sequence of updates which has the same total effect as an update forbidden by the policy. Since XACU is a rich language with inherent ambiguities, checking consistency of a set of XACU rules is difficult, and undecidable in general.