A Modal Logic for Role-Based Access Control

Making correct access-control decisions is central to security, which in turn requires accounting correctly for the identity, credentials, roles, authority, and privileges of users and their agents. In networked systems, these decisions are made more complex because of delegation and differing access-control policies. Methods for reasoning rigorously about access control and computer-assisted reasoning tools for verification are effective for providing assurances of security. In this paper we extend the access-control logic of [11,1] to also support reasoning about role-based access control (RBAC), which is a popular technique for reducing the complexity of assigning privileges to users. The result is an accesscontrol logic which is simple enough for design and verification engineers to use to assure the correctness of systems with access-control requirements but yet powerful enough to reason about delegations, credentials, and trusted authorities. We explain how to describe RBAC c...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: MMMACNS
• Authors: Thumrongsak Kosiyatrakul, Susan Older, Shiu-Kai Chin
• Keywords: Access Control, Access-control Policies, Computer Networks, Correct Access-control Decisions, MMMACNS 2005