Meta-Policies for Distributed Role-Based Access Control Systems

In this paper meta-policies for access control policies are presented. There has been a lot of research into the various ways of specifying policy for a single domain. Such domains are autonomous and can be managed by the users or by a specific system administrator. It is often helpful to have a more general policy description in order to restrict the ways in which policy can be modified. Meta-policies fill this particular role. With their help changes to policy can be made subject to predefined constraints. Meta-policies are long lived and so can provide users with stable information about the policy of the system. In addition they can provide bodies external to a domain with relevant but restricted information about its policies, so forming a basis for co-operation between domains. For example, a domain’s meta-policy can function as a policy interface, thus establishing a basis for agreement on the structure of the objects accessed. In this way it is possible to build service level agreements between domains automatically.