Resiliency policies in access control

We introduce the notion of resiliency policies in the context of access control systems. Such policies require an access control system to be resilient to the absence of users. An example resiliency policy requires that, upon removal of any s users, there should still exist d disjoint sets of users such that the users in each set together possess certain permissions of interest. Such a policy ensures that even when emergency situations cause some users to be absent, there still exist independent teams of users that have the permissions necessary for carrying out critical tasks. The Resiliency Checking Problem determines whether an access control state satisfies a given resiliency policy. We show that the general case of the problem and several subcases are intractable (NP-hard), and identify two subcases that are solvable in linear time. For the intractable cases, we also identify the complexity class in the polynomial hierarchy to which these problems belong. We discuss the design an...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Ninghui Li, Mahesh V. Tripunitara, Qihua Wang
• Keywords: Access Control, Access Control System, CCS 2006, Resiliency, Security Privacy