Authorization approaches for advanced permission-role assignments

Abstract

Role-based access control (RBAC) has been proven to be a flexible and useful access control model for information sharing in distributed collaborative environments. Permission-role assignments (PRA) are one important process in the access model. However, problems may arise during the procedures of PRA. Conflicting permissions may assign to one role, and as a result, the role with the permissions can derive unexpected access capabilities. This paper aims to analyse the problems during the procedures of permission-role assignments in distributed collaborative environments and to develop authorization allocation algorithms to address the problems with permission-role assignments. The algorithms are extended to the case of PRA with the mobility of permission-role relationship. Finally, comparisons with other related work are discussed to demonstrate the effective work of the paper.