Improving Manageability of Access Control Policies

Applications are continuously increasing in both complexity and number of users they serve. Moreover, the set of applications used by organizations is continuously expanding. This poses challenges, not in the least with regard to access control. More specifically, manageability of access control policies becomes more difficult. This leads to administrative overhead and challenges in enforcing a consistent security policy. The goal of this PhD project is to increase manageability of access control by supporting refinement of application-specific access control policies from explicitly specified organization-wide security policies. This paper provides an overview of the challenges and discusses the objectives we set in order to achieve it.