As a platform-independent solution, XML is going to be used in many environments such as application integration and Web Services. Security of XML instance is a basic problem, especially in enterprise with large number of users and XML objects as well as complex authorizations administration. In this paper, a role-based access control (RBAC) model based on XML Schema is proposed. RBAC has been proven to be efficient to improve security administration with flexible authorization management. XML Schema is a specification to define format and contents of XML instance. Access control based on a schema will be transported to all its instances. As a proposed alternate of XML Document Type Definition (DTD), XML Schema supports complex constraints for XML components, such as elements, attributes, datatypes and groups. Also, XML Schema provides a mechanism to build rich reuse relationships between schemas and elements. These will be applied in reusable permissions in our model, which effi...
Xinwen Zhang, Jaehong Park, Ravi S. Sandhu