Towards a Scalable Role and Organization Based Access Control Model with Decentralized Security Administration

AbStrAct This chapter addresses the problem that traditional role-base access control (RBAC) models do not scale up well for modeling security policies spanning multiple organizations. After reviewing recently proposed Role and Organization Based Access Control (ROBAC) models, an administrative ROBAC model called AROBAC07 is presented and formalized in this chapter. Two examples are used to motivate and demonstrate the usefulness of ROBAC. Comparison between AROBAC07 and other administrative RBAC models are given. We show that ROBAC/AROBAC07 can significantly reduce administration complexity for applications involving a large number of organizational units. Finally, an application compartment-based delegation model is introduced, which provides a method to construct administrative role hierarchy in AROBAC07. We show that the AROBAC07 model provides convenient ways to decentralize administrative tasks for ROBAC systems and scales up well for role-based systems involving a large number of organizational units.