Policy analysis for self-administrated role-based access control

Anna Lisa Ferrara, P. Madhusudan, Gennaro Parlato

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Current techniques for security analysis of administrative role-based access control (ARBAC) policies restrict themselves to the separate administration assumption that essentially separates administrative roles from regular ones. The naive algorithm of tracking all users is all that is known for the analysis of ARBAC policies without separate administration, and the state space explosion that this results in precludes building effective tools. In contrast, the separate administration assumption greatly simplifies the analysis since it makes it sufficient to track only one user at a time. However, separation limits the expressiveness of the models and restricts modeling distributed administrative control. We undertake a fundamental study of analysis of ARBAC policies without the separate administration restriction, and show that analysis algorithms can be built that track only a bounded number of users, where the bound depends only on the number of administrative roles in the system. Using this fundamental insight paves the way for us to design an involved heuristic to further tame the state space explosion in practical systems. Our results are also very effective when applied on policies designed under the separate administration restriction. We implement our techniques and report on experiments conducted on several realistic case studies.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationTools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems - 19th Int. Conf., TACAS 2013, Held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2013, Proc.
Pages432-447
Number of pages16
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013
Event19th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, TACAS 2013, Held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2013 - Rome, Italy
Duration: Mar 16 2013Mar 24 2013

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume7795 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other19th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, TACAS 2013, Held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2013
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityRome
Period3/16/133/24/13

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Policy analysis for self-administrated role-based access control'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this