Elsevier

Information Sciences

Volume 179, Issue 15, 4 July 2009, Pages 2629-2642
Information Sciences

Specification and enforcement of flexible security policy for active cooperation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2009.01.040Get rights and content

Abstract

Interoperation and services sharing among different systems are becoming new paradigms for enterprise collaboration. To keep ahead in strong competition environments, an enterprise should provide flexible and comprehensive services to partners and support active collaborations with partners and customers. Achieving such goals requires enterprises to specify and enforce flexible security policies for their information systems. Although the area of access control has been widely investigated, current approaches still do not support flexible security policies able to account for different weighs that typically characterize the various attributes of the requesting parties and transactions and reflect the access control criteria that are relevant for the enterprise. In this paper we propose a novel approach that addresses such flexibility requirements while at the same time reducing the complexity of security management. To support flexible policy specification, we define the notion of restraint rules for authorization management processes and introduce the concept of impact weight for the conditions in these restraint rules. We also introduce a new data structure for the encoding of the condition tree as well as the corresponding algorithm for efficiently evaluating conditions. Furthermore, we present a system architecture that implements above approach and supports interoperation among heterogeneous platforms.

Section snippets

Introduction and motivation

Today enterprises heavily rely on information systems and applications. As a result many tasks that in the past were carried by humans are today automatically executed by computer systems. As a consequence sharing, interoperating and combining services across multiple enterprises are today easier. To keep ahead in strong competition environments, enterprises should provide flexible and comprehensive services to partners and support active collaborations with partners and customers. Achieving

Related work

RBAC is a widely adopted access control model to secure resources in an information system [17]. In RBAC, permissions are associated with roles, and users acquire permissions by being assigned roles. Roles within an organization typically have overlapping sets of permissions and thus they can be organized according to role hierarchies. Constraints are used to reflect security policies of an organization, like Separation of Duty (SoD) that formulates multi-person control policies to discourage

Active authorization management model

This section first presents an overview of the proposed model and then describes in details the various components of the model.

Calculation of restraint rules

Since security policies are expressed in terms of restraint rules, access control relies on the evaluation of the conditions in restraint rules. In this section, we focus on how to efficiently evaluate conditions. We first explore a new data structure, referred to as condition tree, to encode conditions. Then we discuss how to efficiently evaluate the conditions with the help of key nodes and strong nodes on condition tree. Finally, we give the details of determination process and corresponding

Case study

In this section, we would present a comprehensive example to illustrate how to specify and enforce a flexible security policy by our method.

Suppose that in a supply chain management system, a supermarket enterprise, like Wal-Mart, is planning to enforce following flexible security policies in transaction databases and application systems:

  • 1.

    Access rights to sensitive information are assigned to users according to the roles they have. Senior roles are assigned more rights than juniors.

  • 2.

    Users are

System overview

In this section, we would discuss how to integrate the proposed method into legacy systems. Generally, a security administrator of an enterprise is responsible for specifying restraint rules according to security requirements and business missions. The system architecture to implement the proposed model is presented in Fig. 8, in which black thin arrow lines denote commands while thick arrow lines denote data flows. To support interoperation among heterogeneous platform, we adopt XACML to

Conclusions and future work

In this paper we have proposed a novel approach to specify and enforce flexible security policies for active cooperation. It extends the RBAC model with the notion of restraint rules that are enforced by authorization processes. To support flexible policy specification, we introduce the concept impact weight in the conditions of restraint rules. We have also presented the condition tree data structure that efficiently supports condition evaluation. Furthermore, we have discussed the system

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to sincerely appreciate Dr. Ninghui Li, from CERIAS and Department of Computer Science of Purdue University, for his suggestions and comments on this paper. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions. Part of the first author’s work was completed when she was as a visiting scholar at Purdue University of US. This work is supported by the National High Technology Research and Development Program (863 Program) of China (2006AA01A113), by the US NSF

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  • Cited by (0)

    Research supported in part by the National High Technology Research and Development Program (863 Program) of China (2006AA01A113), by the US NSF Grant 0712846 “IPS: Security Services for Healthcare Applications”, by the NSF grant of Shandong Province of China (Y2008G28), and by the sponsor of CERIAS.

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