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Employing UML and OCL for designing and analysing role-based access control

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 July 2013

MIRCO KUHLMANN ,
KARSTEN SOHR  and
MARTIN GOGOLLA
MIRCO KUHLMANN
Affiliation:
Computer Science Department, Database Systems Group, D-28334 Bremen, Germany Email: mk@informatik.uni-bremen.de; gogolla@informatik.uni-bremen.de
KARSTEN SOHR
Affiliation:
Center for Computing Technologies, D-28334 Bremen, Germany Email: sohr@tzi.de
MARTIN GOGOLLA
Affiliation:
Computer Science Department, Database Systems Group, D-28334 Bremen, Germany Email: mk@informatik.uni-bremen.de; gogolla@informatik.uni-bremen.de
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Abstract

The stringent security requirements of organisations like banks or hospitals frequently adopt role-based access control (RBAC) principles to represent and simplify their internal permission management. While representing a fundamental advanced RBAC concept enabling precise restrictions on access rights, authorisation constraints increase the complexity of the resulting security policies so that tool support for convenient creation and adequate validation is required. A particular contribution of our work is a new approach to developing and analysing RBAC policies using a UML-based domain-specific language (DSL), which allows the hiding of the mathematical structures of the underlying authorisation constraints implemented in OCL. The DSL we present is highly configurable and extensible with respect to new concepts and classes of authorisation constraints, and allows the developer to validate RBAC policies in an effective way. The handling of dynamic (that is, time-dependent) constraints, their visual representation through the RBAC DSL and their analysis all form another part of our contribution. The approach is supported by a UML and OCL validation tool.

Type
Paper
Information
Mathematical Structures in Computer Science , Volume 23 , Special Issue 4: Lightweight and Practical Formal Methods in the Design and Analysis of Safety-Critical Systems , August 2013 , pp. 796 - 833
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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