Towards an authorisation model for distributed systems based on the Semantic Web

Authorization is a crucial process in current information systems. Nowadays, many of the current authorization systems do not provide methods to describe the semantics of the underlying information model which they are protecting. This fact can lead to mismatch problems between the semantics of the authorization model and the semantics of the underlying data and resources being protected. In order to solve this problem, this paper describes an authorization model based on Semantic Web technologies. This authorization model uses the Common Information Model (CIM) to represent the underlying information model. For this reason, a new conversion process of CIM into the Semantic Web languages has been proposed converting properly the semantics available in the CIM model. This representation provides a suitable information model based on a well-known logic formalism for implementing the authorization model and a formal language for describing concisely the semantic of the information models being protected. The formal authorization model supports role-based access control (RBAC), hierarchical RBAC, conditional RBAC and object hierarchies, among other features. Moreover, this paper describes an authorization architecture for distributed systems taking into account aspects such as privacy among parties and trust management. Finally, some implementation aspects of this system have been also described.