Abstract
The administration of large Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) systems
is a challenging problem. In order to administer such systems,
decentralization of administration tasks by the use of delegation is
an effective approach.
Þlegation is an effective approach for such
%systems to decentralize administration tasks.
While the
use of delegation greatly enhances flexibility and scalability, it may
reduce the control that an organization has over its resources, thereby
diminishing a major advantage RBAC has over Discretionary Access Control
(DAC). We propose to use security analysis techniques to maintain
desirable security properties while delegating administrative
privileges. We give a precise definition of a family of security
analysis problems in RBAC, which is more general than safety analysis
that is studied in the literature. We show that two classes of
problems in the family can be reduced to similar analysis in the $\SRT$
role-based
trust-management language, thereby establishing an interesting
relationship between RBAC and the $RT$ framework.
The reduction gives efficient algorithms for answering most
kinds of queries in these two classes and establishes the complexity
bounds for the intractable cases.
