Role-Based Access Control Models

This article introduces a family of reference models for rolebased access control (RBAC) in which permissions are associated with roles, and users are made members of appropriate roles. This greatly simpli es management of permissions. Roles are closely related to the concept of user groups in access control. However, a role brings together a set of users on one side and a set of permissions on the other, whereas user groups are typically de ned as a set of users only. The basic concepts of RBAC originated with early multi-user computer systems. The resurgence of interest in RBAC has been driven by the need for general-purpose customizable facilities for RBAC and the need to manage the administration of RBAC itself. As a consequence RBAC facilities range from simple to complex. This article describes a novel framework of reference models to systematically address the diverse components of RBAC, and their interactions.