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R OWL BAC – Representing Role Based Access Control in OWL

R OWL BAC – Representing Role Based Access Control in OWL. Tim Finin, Anupam Joshi, UMBC Lalana Kagal, MIT Jianwei Niu, Ravi Sandhu, William Winsborough, UTSA Bhavani Thuraisingham, UTD. Our Thesis.

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R OWL BAC – Representing Role Based Access Control in OWL

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  1. ROWLBAC – Representing Role Based Access Control in OWL Tim Finin, Anupam Joshi, UMBC Lalana Kagal, MIT Jianwei Niu, Ravi Sandhu, William Winsborough, UTSA Bhavani Thuraisingham, UTD

  2. Our Thesis • Semantic Web technology provides an good framework for enhancing interoperability and portability of authorization policy • We show how RBAC can be supported by OWL (Web Ontology Language)

  3. Why RBAC? • Role Based Access Control • NIST Standard • Real world success • Extensive academic study

  4. What is OWL? • OWL • A family of knowledge representation languages • Based on Description Logic (DL) • XML-based representation in Resource Description Framework (RDF) • W3C standard • Widely used for defining domain vocabularies called ontologies • Used for developing policy languages for Web

  5. Why Support RBAC in OWL? • OWL has features needed in distributed, decentralized environments • Cooperating organizations have their own native schemas and data models • OWL provides an appropriate framework in which to agree on and specify ontologies for roles, actions, and resources • Class hierarchy and other ontological restrictions make OWL particularly effective • Cardinality and disjointness • Grounding in logic facilitates translating among formalisms for analysis or execution

  6. Outline • RBAC in OWL • Basics • Two approaches to representing roles • Each has its own rbac ontology • Domain-specific ontologies • Additional stuff in the paper: • Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) in OWL • Role-based Trust management (RT) and its security analysis in OWL

  7. RBAC in OWL: RBAC Ontology Basics • Actions • Subjects • Objects

  8. RBAC in OWL: Representing Roles • Two approaches to representing roles • Roles as classes • Roles as values • Each approach is supported by its own ontology • Differ in generality of queries that DL reasoning can support

  9. Roles as Classes • Each RBAC role is represented by two OWL classes: • Static assignment to the role (e.g., PermanentResident) • Dynamic activation of the role (e.g., ActivePermanentResident) • These each have two parent classes: • For each RBAC role, the domain-specific ontology has two classes, <RoleName> and <ActiveRoleName>

  10. Roles as Classes • OWL specification assigns static and activated roles • Role hierarchy is represented using the class hierarchy

  11. Roles as Classes Role hierarchy is represented upside down by class hierarchy

  12. Roles as Classes • Separation of duty • OWL directly supports ssod and dsod via the OWL property, disjointWith

  13. Roles as Classes • Permitted and prohibited subclasses of actions • Each action is an instance of exactly one subclass • PEP can query which one a given action belongs to

  14. Roles as Classes • Permission-role assignments are supported via rbac:PermittedAction • Domain-specific ontology example:

  15. Roles as Classes • Enforcing dsod constraints • User attempts to create a ActivateRole action Consider all currently active roles

  16. Roles as Values • Roles are modeled as instances of a generic Role class

  17. Roles as Values • Example:

  18. Roles as Values • Role hierarchy • RBAC ontology: • Domain-specific ontology:

  19. Roles as Values • Reasoning about inheritance

  20. Roles as Values • Separation of duty • RBAC ontology: • Domain-specific ontology:

  21. Roles as Values • Detecting separation of duty violations

  22. Roles as Values • Permission-role assignment • RBAC ontology: • Domain-specific ontology:

  23. Roles as Values • Determining whether an action is permitted

  24. Comparison of Approaches • Roles-as-classes supports more general queries • Can ask whether a specific user can access a specific resource • But, can also ask whether all members of a given role can access a class of resources • Roles-as-values • Can only ask whether a specific user can access a specific resource • Domain-specific ontologies for roles as values is simpler

  25. Changing State • Changes in the RBAC system have to be modeled by changing the set of OWL clauses • Adding clauses can be done efficiently • Adding a user to a role • A user activating a role • Removing clauses can lead to a lot of reevaluation • Removing a user from a role • A user deactivating a role

  26. Other Stuff • The paper also talks about supporting • Attribute Based Access Control • Object attributes such as location • Partial support of Role-based Trust management (RT) • Partial support of security analysis in RT

  27. Conclusion • OWL provides many features that support RBAC, ABAC, RT, and security analysis • It also easily supports nice extensions • Class hierarchy of objects • Reasons • The logical semantics of OWL • Powerful features such as transitive properties, class hierarchy, cardinality constraints, disjoint classes, equivalent classes

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