Advanced permission-role relationship in role-based access control

Abstract

Permission-role assignment is an important issue in role-based access control (RBAC). There are two types of problems that may arise in permission-role assignment. One is related to authorization granting process. Conflicting permissions may be granted to a role, and as a result, users with the role may have or derive a high level of authority. The other is related to authorization revocation. When a permission is revoked from a role, the role may still have the permission from other roles. In this paper, we discuss granting and revocation models related to mobile and immobile memberships between permissions and roles, then provide proposed authorization granting algorithm to check conflicts and help allocate the permissions without compromising the security. To our best knowledge, the new revocation models, local and global revocation, have not been studied before. The local and global revocation algorithms based on relational algebra and operations provide a rich variety. We also apply the new algorithms to an anonymity scalable payment scheme.