Policy-Engineering Optimization with Visual Representation and Separation-of-Duty Constraints in Attribute-Based Access Control

Recently, attribute-based access control (ABAC) has received increasingly more attention and has emerged as the desired access control mechanism for many organizations because of its flexibility and scalability for authorization management, as well as its security policies, such as separation-of-duty constraints and mutually exclusive constraints. Policy-engineering technology is an effective approach for the construction of ABAC systems. However, most conventional methods lack interpretability, and their constructing processes are complex. Furthermore, they do not consider the separation-of-duty constraints. To address these issues in ABAC, this paper proposes a novel method called policy engineering optimization with visual representation and separation of duty constraints (PEO_VR&SOD). First, to enhance interpretability while mining a minimal set of rules, we use the visual technique with Hamming distance to reduce the policy mining scale and present a policy mining algorithm. Second, to verify whether the separation of duty constraints can be satisfied in a constructed policy engineering system, we use the method of SAT-based model counting to reduce the constraints and construct mutually exclusive constraints to implicitly enforce the given separation of duty constraints. The experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method and show encouraging results.

Role-Mining Optimization with Separation-of-Duty Constraints and Security Detections for Authorizations

Role-based access control (RBAC), which has been regarded as one of the most popular access-control mechanisms, is featured by the separation-of-duty constraints, mutually exclusive constraints, and the least-privileges principle. Role mining, a bottom-up role-engineering technology, is an effective method to migrate from a non-RBAC system to an RBAC system. However, conventional role-mining approaches not only do not consider the separation of duty constraints, but also cannot ensure the security of a constructed RBAC system when the corresponding mined results violate the separation of a duty constraint and/or the least-privileges principle. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a novel method called role-mining optimization with separation-of-duty constraints and security detections for authorizations (RMO_SODSDA), which mainly includes two aspects. First, we present a role-mining-optimization approach for satisfying the separation of duty constraints, and we constructed different variants of mutually exclusive constraints to correctly implement the given separation of duty constraints based on unconstrained role mining. Second, to ensure the security of the constructed system and evaluate authorization performance, we reduced the authorization-query problem to a maximal-satisfiability problem. The experiments validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

Permission-Based Separation of Duty in Dynamic Role-Based Access Control Model

A major development in the field of access control is the dominant role-based access control (RBAC) scheme. The fascination of RBAC lies in its enhanced security along with the concept of roles. In addition, attribute-based access control (ABAC) is added to the access control models, which is famous for its dynamic behavior. Separation of duty (SOD) is used for enforcing least privilege concept in RBAC and ABAC. Moreover, SOD is a powerful tool that is used to protect an organization from internal security attacks and threats. Different problems have been found in the implementation of SOD at the role level. This paper discusses that the implementation of SOD on the level of roles is not a good option. Therefore, this paper proposes a hybrid access control model to implement SOD on the basis of permissions. The first part of the proposed model is based on the addition of attributes with dynamic characteristics in the RBAC model, whereas the second part of the model implements the permission-based SOD in dynamic RBAC model. Moreover, in comparison with previous models, performance and feature analysis are performed to show the strength of dynamic RBAC model. This model improves the performance of the RBAC model in terms of time, dynamicity, and automatic permissions and roles assignment. At the same time, this model also reduces the administrator’s load and provides a flexible, dynamic, and secure access control model.