Supporting authorization query and inter-domain role mapping in presence of hybrid role hierarchy

ABSTRACT

The role hierarchy is one of the most distinguished features of an RBAC approach to securing large systems as it facilitates efficient administration of permissions. However, the role hierarchy as defined in the currently standardized RBAC model has limitations in capturing generic policy requirements such as separation of duty, time-based and cardinality constraints. To address such limitations, permission inheritance and activation inheritance semantics have been introduced to define three different types of role hierarchies. In presence of a hybrid hierarchy that allows all the three types of hierarchies to coexist, the overall hierarchy administration problem becomes quite complex. A key problem is to efficiently handle authorization queries to decide whether a user's request to activate a set of roles should be granted. A hybrid hierarchy also makes the problem of mapping a request for a set of permissions to a minimal set of roles difficult. Such a mapping is crucial in multidomain environments where different security domains have to establish and engage in secure interoperation by first mapping their security policies. In this paper, we investigate these two problems and present solutions that are efficient and practical.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.6 Security and Protection
          Subjects: Access controls

Additional Classification:
  G. Mathematics of Computing
  G.4 MATHEMATICAL SOFTWARE
      Subjects: Algorithm design and analysis

General Terms:
Algorithms, Security, Theory

Keywords:
hierarchy, multidomain, role based access control, role mapping, secure interoperation