Discretionary and Mandatory Controls for Role-Based Administration

Role-based access control is an important way of limiting the access users have to computing resources. While the basic concepts of role-based access control are now well understood, there is no consensus on the best approach to managing role-based systems. In this paper, we introduce a new model for role-based administration, using the notions of discretionary and mandatory controls. Our model provides a number of important features that control the assignment of users and permissions to roles. This means that we can limit the damage that can be done by malicious administrative users. We compare our approach to a number of other models for role-based administration, and demonstrate that our model has several advantages.