An Attribute Certificate Management System for Attribute-Based Access Control

A Virtual Organization (VO) consists of some real organizations with common interests, which aims to provide inter organizational associations to reach some common goals by sharing their resources with each other. Providing security mechanisms, and especially a suitable access control mechanism, which enforces the defined security policy is a necessary requirement in VOs. Since VO is a complex environment with the huge number of users and resources, traditional access control models cannot satisfy VOs security requirements. Most of the current proposals are basically based on the attributes of users and resources. In this paper, we suggest using a combination of the semantic based access control (SBAC) model, and the attribute based access control (ABAC) model with the shared ontology of subjects' attributes in VOs. In this model, each participating organization makes its access control decisions according to an enhanced model of the ABAC model. However, access decision in the VO is made in more abstract level through an enhanced model of theSBACmodel. Using the ontology of users and resources in this model facilitates access control in large scale VOs with numerous organizations. By the combination ofSBACand ABAC, we attain their benefits and eliminate their shortcomings. In order to show the applicability of the proposed model, an access control system, based on the proposed model, has been implemented in Java using available APIs, including Sun's XACML API, Jena, Pellet, and Protege.

In the modern computing era, access to resources is often restricted through contextual information and the attributes of users, objects and various other entities. Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) can capture those requirements as a policy, but it is not yet adopted like Role Based Access Control (RBAC) due to lack of a comprehensive administrative model. In the last few years, several efforts have been made to combine ABAC with RBAC, but they are limited to specification and enforcement only. Recently, we have presented a unified framework along with a role based administrative model that enables specification, enforcement and maintenance of unified access control policies, such as ABAC, RBAC and Meta-Policy Based Access Control (MPBAC). This paper describes role-based administrative model components and then present a methodology which uses a fixed-point based approach for verifying the security properties (like safety and liveness) of those policies in the presence of the administrative model. We also analyse the impact of ABAC, RBAC, MPBAC and administrative model components on the time taken for security analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is scalable as well as effective.

Role based access control (RBAC) is well known due to its high security and ease in management for permissions. But it also has some deficiencies like role structure complexity and having no dynamic behavior. Attribute based access control (ABAC) is a dynamic access control model that provides ease of role structuring. Analyzing roles and permissions after implementing access control model and its management is not easy in ABAC. In this paper, an access control model is developed that accumulates the strengths of RBAC and ABAC and also remove some of the deficiencies of above stated models. The proposed model implements and exploits the attributes of objects, permissions, roles, and users as foundation. Moreover the proposed model employs the role structuring ability of ABAC and tight security behavior of RBAC. We also implemented the proposed model and discussed with respect to a case study.

In this disseration we propose semi-automated top-down policy engineering approaches for attribute-based access control (ABAC) development. Further, we propose a hybrid ABAC policy engineering approach to combine the benefits and address the shortcomings of both top-down and bottom-up approaches. In particular, we propose three frameworks: (i) ABAC attributes extraction, (ii) ABAC constraints extraction, and (iii) hybrid ABAC policy engineering. Attributes extraction framework comprises of five modules that operate together to extract attributes values from natural language access control policies (NLACPs); map the extracted values to attribute keys; and assign each key-value pair to an appropriate entity. For ABAC constraints extraction framework, we design a two-phase process to extract ABAC constraints from NLACPs. The process begins with the identification phase which focuses on identifying the right boundary of constraint expressions. Next is the normalization phase, that aims at extracting the actual elements that pose a constraint. On the other hand, our hybrid ABAC policy engineering framework consists of 5 modules. This framework combines top-down and bottom-up policy engineering techniques to overcome the shortcomings of both approaches and to generate policies that are more intuitive and relevant to actual organization policies. With this, we believe that our work takes essential steps towards a semi-automated ABAC policy development experience.

Healthcare systems are increasingly vulnerable to security threats due to their reliance on digital platforms. Traditional access control models like Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) have limitations in mitigating evolving risks in these systems. Despite their unique features, these models face limitations in mitigating evolving risks in healthcare systems. Traditional models are primarily oriented towards allocating permissions according to predetermined roles or policies, which results in challenges in effectively adapting to the dynamic complexities of modern healthcare ecosystems. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel risk-aware RBAC and ABAC access control model to enhance the flexibility, adaptability and security issues associated with healthcare systems. The proposed model integrates RBAC for role-based categorization, ABAC for fine-grained control based on user attributes and environmental factors, and Risk-Based Access Control (RiBAC) for dynamic risk assessment. The proposed model dynamically adjusts access permissions based on risk values, ensuring accurate and adaptable access control decisions. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed model in granting access to authorized users while denying access to unauthorized users. Through a series of 43 experiments that simulate various scenarios of access control operations in the healthcare system, the proposed model demonstrates significant improvement in the accuracy, precision, and recall of access control decisions compared to traditional models. The proposed model’s ability to dynamically assess risk and adjust access permissions based on contextual factors significantly enhances its ability to mitigate threats and protect sensitive medical data.

We describe a method that centrally manages Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) policies and locally computes and enforces decisions regarding those policies for protection of resource repositories in host systems using their native Access Control List (ACL) mechanisms. The method is founded on the expression of an ABAC policy that conforms to the access control rules of an enterprise and leverages the ABAC policy expression by introducing representations of local host repositories into the ABAC policy expression as objects or object attributes. Repositories may be comprised of individual files, directories, or other resources that require protection. The method further maintains a correspondence between the ABAC representations and repositories in local host systems. The method also leverages an ability to conduct policy analytics in such a way as to formulate ACLs for those representations in accordance with the ABAC policy and create ACLs on repositories using the ACLs of their corresponding representations. As the ABAC policy configuration changes, the method updates the ACLs on affected representations and automatically updates corresponding ACLs on local repositories. Operationally, users attempt to access resources in local host systems, and the ABAC policy is enforced in those systems in terms of their native ACLs.

While the DoD has a strong identity and credential management foundation, much work remains to achieve the DoD access control vision of providing dynamic access control with appropriate granularity. Ongoing access control investments are transitioning from administrators manually provisioning of user accounts to Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) capabilities. While this offers significant operational benefits over manual provisioning, ABAC capabilities must evolve. A limiting factor of the ABAC method is its reliance on the availability of authoritative attributes, and the need for access control policies that focus on specific access requests and still result in desired enterprise-wide operations. In today's DoD mission and business environments, there is a compelling need to provide authorized users, both anticipated and unanticipated, access to sensitive and classified enterprise information and the resources they need, when and where they need it, while preventing disclosure or exploitation by malicious insiders and other adversaries access to the same information. To meet this challenge, a DoD-wide Dynamic Access Management capability is needed by combining ABAC with risk management to achieve Risk Adaptive Access Control (RAdAC).

Providing the right information to the right person at the right time is critical, especially for emergency response and law enforcement operations. Accomplishing this across sovereign organizations while keeping resources secure is a formidable task. What is needed is an access control solution that can break down information silos by securely enabling information sharing with non-provisioned users in a dynamic environment. Multiple government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) are currently developing Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) solutions to do just that. ABAC supports cross-organizational information sharing by facilitating policy-based resource access control. The critical components of an ABAC solution are the governing organizational policies, attribute syntax and semantics, and authoritative sources. The policies define the business objectives and the authoritative sources provide critical attribute attestation, but syntactic and semantic agreement between the information exchange endpoints is the linchpin of attribute sharing. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) standard provides federation partners with a viable attribute sharing syntax, but establishing semantic agreement is an impediment to ABAC efforts. This critical issue can be successfully addressed with conceptual modeling. S&T is sponsoring the following research and development effort to provide a concept model of the User Identity, Credential, and Access Management decision space for secure information sharing.

Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) is increasingly becoming popular due to its dynamic, flexible, portable, and scalable nature. Under ABAC, security policies (ABAC rules) are stated in terms of the attributes of the subject, the object and the environment. A subject is granted access to an object if their respective attribute values are satisfied against a set of ABAC rules. Typically hierarchical relationships exist among the subjects as well as the objects, where more specific subjects (objects) inherit the attributes from the general ones. As such, if a subject is allowed access to a general object, that subject is allowed to access all of its sub-types. This has been the general understanding and current ABAC enforcement and policy mining approaches follow this approach. However, in this article, we argue that the general understanding of the semantics of the ABAC is not always appropriate. Indeed, under certain semantics, the specific data may be more sensitive than that of its general counterpart. In that situation, if a subject is allowed access to a general type, it should not be allowed access to its sub-type, which is contrary to the current understanding and implementation. This paper is the first attempt in the literature to distinguish these two different ABAC semantics arising from the different semantics of object attributes themselves. We present concrete examples of these two semantics and demonstrate what can go wrong - both anecdotally as well as empirically - if one ignores the underlying semantics and inappropriately uses the existing enforcement and mining algorithms. We then present how existing algorithms can be modified so that no misconfigurations arise and security is ensured.

CRBAC: Imposing multi-grained constraints on the RBAC model in the multi-application environment

Access control is a security technique that specifies which users can access particular resources in a computing environment. Over the years, numerous access control models have been developed to address various aspects of computer security. In this paper, we focus on a modern approach, attribute-based access control (ABAC), which has been proposed in order to overcome limitations of traditional models: discretionary access control (DAC), mandatory access control (MAC) and role-based access control (RBAC). The work on integrating access control mechanisms in semantic web technologies is developing into two directions: (1) to use semantic web technologies for modeling and analyzing access control policies and (2) to protect knowledge encoded in an ontology. In this paper we focus on the first issue and investigate how ABAC can be integrated into ontology languages.

Business processes, the next-generation workflows, have attracted considerable interest in recent years. Several XML-based languages have been proposed for specifying and orchestrating business processes. WS-BPEL (Web Services Business Process Execution Language), which is widely used in business process specification, cannot support authorization policies on the execution of activities. In this paper, we propose an approach that extends WS-BPEL with ABAC (Attribute Based Access Control) model to satisfy the access control requirements of business processes. We introduce an access control framework for Web services in business processes, and through integrating ABAC and WS-BPEL, we make it possible to make access control policies for business processes.

Access control policies are crucial for establishing a secure access control system and are fundamentally based on access control models such as attribute-based access control (ABAC). Moreover, the execution of business process instances is generally recorded within an event log. It is essential to ensure conformance with ABAC policies for the event log at the time of post-execution. To conduct conformance testing of ABAC policies in business process event logs, formalizing these ABAC policies is necessary. However, the formalization is typically carried out manually, which leads to inefficiencies, low maintainability, a high likelihood of errors, and difficulty in detecting the errors. Also, there has been a notable lack of an access control metamodel to support the formalization and conformance testing of ABAC policies, as well as insufficient attention to constructing ABAC policies from existing process logs. This paper presents a model-driven workflow for significantly automating the formalization and conformance testing of ABAC policies in process logs. By leveraging a novel ABAC metamodel and its reusable patterns, the approach addresses the aforementioned issues, demonstrating effectiveness through experiments on a real-world process log.

With the development of ICT technology, it has also been applied to the power grid, but as a target of hackers' attack, a security solution to protect the power grid is being studied. Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) is one of the most commonly used security solutions by providing granular and flexible access control, but it threatens privacy because it determines access control based on user attribute values. With user privacy emerging as a new topic, Decentralized Identity(DID) is emerging as a new alternative for protecting user privacy. In this paper, we propose a DID-based ABAC to solve the problem of ABAC's privacy exposure and apply it to a power transaction platform.

Fast Health Interoperability Services (FHIR) is the most recent in the line of standards for healthcare resources. FHIR represents different types of medical artifacts as resources and also provides recommendations for their authorized disclosure using web-based protocols including O-Auth and OpenId Connect and also defines security labels. In most cases, Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is used to secure access to FHIR resources. We provide an alternative approach based on Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) that allows attributes of subjects and objects to take part in authorization decision. Our system allows various stakeholders to define policies governing the release of healthcare data. It also authenticates the end user requesting access. Our system acts as a middle-layer between the end-user and the FHIR server. Our system provides efficient release of individual and batch resources both during normal operations and also during emergencies. We also provide an implementation that demonstrates the feasibility of our approach.