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Challenges in Engineering Self-Adaptive Authorisation Infrastructures

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Abstract

As organisations expand and interconnect, authorisation infrastructures become increasingly difficult to manage. Several solutions have been proposed, including self-adaptive authorisation, where the access control policies are dynamically adapted at run-time to respond to misuse and malicious behaviour. The ultimate goal of self-adaptive authorisation is to reduce human intervention, make authorisation infrastructures more responsive to malicious behaviour, and manage access control in a more cost-effective way. In this chapter, we scope and define the emerging area of self-adaptive authorisation by describing some of its developments, trends, and challenges. For that, we start by identifying key concepts related to access control and authorisation infrastructures and provide a brief introduction to self-adaptive software systems, which provides the foundation for investigating how self-adaptation can enable the enforcement of authorisation policies. The outcome of this study is the identification of several technical challenges related to self-adaptive authorisation, which are classified according to the different stages of a feedback control loop.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Also referred to as the self-adaptive layer.

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Montrieux, L., de Lemos, R., Bailey, C. (2019). Challenges in Engineering Self-Adaptive Authorisation Infrastructures. In: Yu, Y., et al. Engineering Adaptive Software Systems. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2185-6_3

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