H-RBAC: A Hierarchical Access Control Model for SaaS Systems

SaaS is a new way to deploy software as a hosted service and accessed over the Internet which means the customers don’t need to maintain the software code and data on their own servers. So it’s more important for SaaS systems to take security issues into account. Access control is a security mechanism that enables an authority to access to certain restricted areas and resources according to the permissions assigned to a user. Several access models have been proposed to realize the access control of single instance systems. However, most of the existing models couldn’t address the following SaaS system problems: (1) role name conflicts (2) cross-level management (3) the isomerism of tenants' access control (4) temporal delegation constraints. This paper describes a hierarchical RBAC model called HRBAC solves all the four problems of SaaS systems mentioned above. This model addresses the SaaS system access control in both system level and tenant level. It combines the advantages of RBDM and ARBAC97 model and introduces temporal constraints to SaaS access control model. In addition, a practical approach to implement the access control module for SaaS systems based on H-RBAC model is also proposed in this paper.