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Ontology-Based Delegation of Access Control: An Enhancement to the XACML Delegation Profile

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Trust, Privacy and Security in Digital Business (TrustBus 2015)

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Abstract

Delegation of access control (i.e. transferring access rights on a resource to another tenant) is crucial to efficiently decentralize the access control management in large and dynamic scenarios. Most of the delegation methods available in the literature are based on the RBAC or ABAC models. However, their applicability can be hampered by: (i) the effort required to manage and enforce multiple roles for each delegatee (i.e. access roles and delegated roles) and (ii) the efforts required to specify constraints for the enforcement of the delegated roles or policies. Moreover, the performance of these methods decreases proportionally as the number of users increase. To tackle these issues, we propose an ontology-based delegation framework that enhances the standard XACML delegation profile by modeling the delegation logics in an ontological way. By means of the ontology, the operations of delegation, verification and revocation of access rights can be performed on the workflow generated by instantiating the ontology classes and their interrelations according to the entities involved in the delegation. By exploiting these workflows, we propose a cost-effective algorithm that performs delegation operations without involving any human intervention.

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Acknowledgements and Disclaimer

This work was partly supported by the European Commission under FP7 project Inter-Trust and H2020 project CLARUS, by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (through projects CO-PRIVACY TIN2011-27076-C03-01 and ICWT TIN2012-32757) and by the Government of Catalonia (under grant 2014 SGR 537). This work was also made possible through the support of a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation. The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of UNESCO of the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

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Correspondence to Malik Imran Daud .

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Daud, M.I., Sánchez, D., Viejo, A. (2015). Ontology-Based Delegation of Access Control: An Enhancement to the XACML Delegation Profile. In: Fischer-Hübner, S., Lambrinoudakis, C., López, J. (eds) Trust, Privacy and Security in Digital Business. TrustBus 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9264. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22906-5_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22906-5_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-22905-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-22906-5

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