Theory And Application Of Role-based Access Control For The Resource Space Model

The Resource Space Model is a semantic data model for specifying, storing, managing and locating Web resources by appropriately classifying the contents of resources. A resource space can be normalized to increase the correctness of resource management by setting constraints on dimensions. How to set up an effective access control mechanism is a key for Resource Space Model to manage Web resources safely and effectively.In this paper, we introduce the basic concepts of Resource Space Model and review traditional access controls with focuses on RBAC96 model and proposed RBAC standard of NIST. Applications of these access control technology in traditional data management models are also summarized. In order to attack difficulties of RSM resources protection, we propose a model named RSM-RBAC based on the RBAC96 model and the proposed RBAC standard of NIST. In RSM-RBAC, for the sake of management division, a concept of "organization" is brought forward. We also introduce two new operations named "roll-up" and "drill-down" separately in order to manipulate the resources more flexibly. Furthermore, rules of authorization and authentication are discussed carefully; "Periodic Authorization" is used to control the granularity of time of authorization, and negative and positive permission types are applied to resolve the problems caused by overlapping of authorization in RSM. At the end of this paper, a decision-making algorithm suitable for RSM-RBAC is presented based on a data structure for user-permission assignment relations.Implementation of RSM-RBAC is organized into four components: Role Management, User Management, Session function, Decision-making.