Representation and Reasoning on Role-Based Access Control Policies with Conceptual Graphs

This paper focused on two aspects of access control: graphical representation and reasoning. Access control policies describe which operations on resources are granted to users. Role-based access control is the model which introduces the concept of role to design user’ permissions. Actually, there is a lack of tools allowing security officers to describe and reason on their policies graphically. Thanks to conceptual graphs, we can provide a consistent graphical formalism for role-based access control policies, able to deal with specificities of this model such as role hierarchy and constraints. Moreover, once a policy modelled within CGs, graph rules and chainings can be used to reason on it. Thus, allowing SOs to understand why (through wich role assignment) user’ permissions are granted and to find constraints violated by assignments.