An Access Control Model for Protecting Semantic Web Resources

Semantic Web is a vision for future of the current Web which aims at automation, integration and reuse of data among different Web applications. Access to resources on the Semantic Web can not be controlled in a safe way unless the access decision takes into account the semantic relationships among entities in the data model under this environment. Decision making for permitting or denying access requests by assuming entities in isolation and not considering their interrelations may result in security violations. In this paper, we present a Semantic Based Access Control model (SBAC) which considers this issue in the decision making process. To facilitate the propagation of policies in these three domains, we show how different semantic interrelations can be reduced to the subsumption problem. This reduction enhances the space and time complexity of the access control mechanisms which are based on SBAC. Our evaluations of the SBAC model along with experimental results on a sample implementation of the access control system show that the proposed model is very promising.