Temporal Hierarchy and Inheritance Semantics for GTRBAC

A Generalized Temporal Role Based Access Control (GTRBAC) model that captures an exhaustive set of temporal constraint needs for access control has recently been proposed. GTRBAC’s language constructs allow one to specify various temporal constraints on role, userrole assignments and role-permission assignments. However, the presence of temporal constraints on role enablings and role activations can have various implications on a role hierarchy. In this paper, we present an analysis of the effects of GTRBAC temporal constraints on a role hierarchy and introduce various kinds of temporal hierarchies. In particular, we show that there are certain distinctions that need to be made in permission inheritance and role activation semantics in order to capture all the effects of GTRBAC constraints such as role enablings and role activations on a role hierarchy. Portions of this work were supported by the sponsors of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)