skip to main content
10.1145/3450569.3463570acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessacmatConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Towards Unifying RBAC with Information Flow Control

Published: 11 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Role-based Access Control (RBAC) is one of the most widely implemented access control models. In today's complex computing systems, one of the increasingly sought-after features for reliable security is information flow control. Although RBAC is a policy-neutral and generic model, its implementations generally do not provide information flow control. In this paper, we present two approaches to address this issue. In the first method, we describe how a lattice model can be captured using an RBAC configuration. In the second method, we analyze the information flows in a given RBAC policy using a decentralized lattice model called Readers-Writers Flow Model. This method identifies the indirect information flows in the policy and helps in creating flow-secure RBAC policies. We discuss the scope and limitations of these methods in detail and also present a brief case study. Finally, we investigate the use of flow-secure RBAC policies in creating flow-secure Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) policies.

References

[1]
Peter Amthor, Winfried E. Kühnhauser, and Anja Pölck. 2014. WorSE: A Work-bench for Model-based Security Engineering. Computers & Security 42 (2014),40--55.
[2]
D Elliott Bell and Leonard J LaPadula. 1973. Secure computer systems: Mathematical foundations. Technical Report MTR-2547-VOL-1. MITRE Corp Bedford, MA.
[3]
Kenneth J Biba. 1977. Integrity considerations for secure computer systems. Technical Report MTR-3153-REV-1. MITRE Corp Bedford MA.
[4]
D. F. C. Brewer and Michael J. Nash. 1989. The Chinese Wall Security Policy. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. 206--214.
[5]
Niklas Broberg and David Sands. 2010. Paralocks: role-based information flow control and beyond. In Proceedings of the 37th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, POPL. 431--444.
[6]
Shuvra Chakraborty, Ravi Sandhu, and Ram Krishnan. 2019. On the Feasibility of RBAC to ABAC Policy Mining: A Formal Analysis. In Secure Knowledge Management In Artificial Intelligence Era - 8th International Conference, SKM, Proceedings. 147--163.
[7]
Dorothy E Denning. 1976. A lattice model of secure information flow. Communications of the ACM 19, 5 (1976), 236--243.
[8]
Mikhail I. Gofman, Ruiqi Luo, Ayla C. Solomon, Yingbin Zhang, Ping Yang, and Scott D. Stoller. 2009. RBAC-PAT: A Policy Analysis Tool for Role Based Access Control. In Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, 15th International Conference, TACAS. Proceedings. 46--49.
[9]
Willem De Groef, Dominique Devriese, Nick Nikiforakis, and Frank Piessens. 2012. FlowFox: a web browser with flexible and precise information flow control. In The ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS'12. 748--759.
[10]
Vincent C Hu, David Ferraiolo, Rick Kuhn, Arthur R Friedman, Alan J Lang, Margaret M Cogdell, Adam Schnitzer, Kenneth Sandlin, Robert Miller, Karen Scarfone, et al.2013. Guide to attribute based access control (abac) definition and considerations (draft). NIST special publication800, 162 (2013).
[11]
D. Richard Kuhn, Edward J. Coyne, and Timothy R. Weil. 2010. Adding Attributes to Role-Based Access Control. IEEE Computer 43, 6 (2010), 79--81.
[12]
N. V. Narendra Kumar and R. K. Shyamasundar. 2017. A Complete Generative Label Model for Lattice-Based Access Control Models. In Software Engineering and Formal Methods - 15th International Conference, SEFM. Proceedings. 35--53.
[13]
Bishop Matt. 2002. Computer Security: Art and Science. Addison-Wesley Professional.
[14]
Microsoft. 2021. Microsoft Azure. Retrieved March, 2021 from https://azure.microsoft.com
[15]
James Morris, Stephen Smalley, and Greg Kroah-Hartman. 2002. Linux security modules: General security support for the linux kernel. In USENIX Security Symposium. 17--31.
[16]
Matunda Nyanchama and Sylvia L. Osborn. 1995. Modeling Mandatory Access Control in Role-Based Security Systems. In Proceedings of the Ninth Annual IFIPWG11 Working Conference on Database Security DBSec. 129--144.
[17]
Matunda Nyanchama and Sylvia L. Osborn. 1999. The Role Graph Model andConflict of Interest. ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC)2, 1 (1999), 3--33.
[18]
Sylvia L. Osborn. 2002. Information flow analysis of an RBAC system. In 7th ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies, SACMAT. 163--168.
[19]
Sylvia L. Osborn, Ravi S. Sandhu, and Qamar Munawer. 2000. Configuring role-based access control to enforce mandatory and discretionary access control policies. ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC)3, 2(2000), 85--106.
[20]
Kyle Pullicino. 2014. Jif: Language-based Information-flow Security in Java. CoRRabs/1412.8639 (2014).
[21]
B S Radhika, N. V. Narendra Kumar, and R. K. Shyamasundar. 2018. FlowConSEAL: Automatic Flow Consistency Analysis of SEAndroid and SELinux Policies. In Annual IFIP Conference on Data and Applications Security and Privacy, DBSec. 219--231.
[22]
B. S. Radhika, N. V. Narendra Kumar, R. K. Shyamasundar, and Parjanya Vyas. 2020. Consistency analysis and flow secure enforcement of SELinux policies. Computers & Security 94 (2020), 101816.
[23]
Ravi S. Sandhu. 1995. Rationale for the RBAC 96 family of access control models. In Proceedings of the First ACM Workshop on Role-Based Access Control, RBAC.
[24]
Ravi S. Sandhu. 1996. Role Hierarchies and Constraints for Lattice-Based Access Controls. In Computer Security - ESORICS 96, 4th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security. Proceedings. 65--79.
[25]
Ravi S. Sandhu. 2012. The authorization leap from rights to attributes: maturation or chaos?. In 17th ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies, SACMAT. 69--70.
[26]
Ravi S. Sandhu, David F. Ferraiolo, and D. Richard Kuhn. 2000. The NIST model for role-based access control: towards a unified standard. In Fifth ACM Workshop on Role-Based Access Control, RBAC. 47--63.
[27]
Noa Tuval and Ehud Gudes. 2006. Resolving Information Flow Conflicts in RBAC Systems. In Annual IFIP Conference on Data and Applications Security, DBSec. Proceedings. 148--162.
[28]
Zhongyuan Xu and Scott D. Stoller. 2013. Mining Attribute-based Access Control Policies. CoRRabs/1306.2401 (2013).

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Strategy for Implementing of Zero Trust ArchitectureIEEE Transactions on Reliability10.1109/TR.2023.334566573:1(93-100)Online publication date: Mar-2024
  • (2021)Realizing Information Flow Control in ABAC MiningCyberspace Safety and Security10.1007/978-3-030-94029-4_8(107-119)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2021

Index Terms

  1. Towards Unifying RBAC with Information Flow Control

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      SACMAT '21: Proceedings of the 26th ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies
      June 2021
      194 pages
      ISBN:9781450383653
      DOI:10.1145/3450569
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

      Sponsors

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 11 June 2021

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. ABAC mining
      2. RBAC
      3. flow-secure policy
      4. information flow control
      5. readers-writers flow model
      6. role-based access control

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article

      Conference

      SACMAT '21
      Sponsor:

      Acceptance Rates

      Overall Acceptance Rate 177 of 597 submissions, 30%

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)38
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3
      Reflects downloads up to 27 Feb 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all
      • (2024)Strategy for Implementing of Zero Trust ArchitectureIEEE Transactions on Reliability10.1109/TR.2023.334566573:1(93-100)Online publication date: Mar-2024
      • (2021)Realizing Information Flow Control in ABAC MiningCyberspace Safety and Security10.1007/978-3-030-94029-4_8(107-119)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2021

      View Options

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Figures

      Tables

      Media

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media