Graph-Based Specification of Admin-CBAC Policies

What is it about?

Administrative policies are used to control the operations that access control administrators can perform. They are typically used to ensure that administrators actions do not cause a security risk. This paper presents a visual language, using graphs, to define administrative policies. Since it uses a generic access control model, the results are applicable to a variety of access control models and languages.

Featured Image

Photo by Max Langelott on Unsplash

Photo by Max Langelott on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Policy administration is difficult due to the complexity of the systems that need to be protected and the risks associated with policy update errors. For this reason, administrative operations need to be carefully controlled. In this paper we show that administrative operations are naturally specified by graph rewriting rules, making it easier to visualise policy changes. We classify administrative actions in two groups: a group of generic actions that are available in all policies, and a second group of application-specific actions. We prove that the generic actions preserve validity of the policy, and characterise classes of rules that preserve policy properties. We also discuss policy-analysis techniques to help administrators check that policies satisfy the required constraints. Our framework is flexible, it is easy to extend it to define new, domain-specific policies when needed, simply by specialising the set of actions and adding rules.