Access control by action control

ABSTRACT

We address the problem of defining access control policies that may be used in the evaluation of requests made by client actors, in the course of e-trading, to perform actions on the resources maintained by an e-collective. An e-collective is a group of agents that may act individually or in conjunction with other agents to satisfy a client's request to act. Our principal contribution to this key problem is to define formally an access control model in terms of which policies may be specified for helping to ensure that only legitimate forms of client actions are performed in the course of engaging in e-trading. We call this model the action control model. In action control, the notion of intentional, empowered, authorized actions, that may be performed individualistically or jointly with other agents, and in a manner that is consistent with a group ethos, is the basis for specifying a set of permissives. A permissive is a generalization of the notion of a permission (as the latter term is usually interpreted in access control). In addition to the formal definition of the action control model, we give examples of action control policy specifications and we describe a candidate implementation and performance measures.

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INDEX TERMS

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

General Terms:
Security

Keywords:
action control, logic