Vac - Verifier of administrative role-based access control policies

Abstract

In this paper we present Vac, an automatic tool for verifying security properties of administrative Role-based Access Control (RBAC). RBAC has become an increasingly popular access control model, particularly suitable for large organizations, and it is implemented in several software. Automatic security analysis of administrative RBAC systems is recognized as an important problem, as an analysis tool can help designers check whether their policies meet expected security properties. Vac converts administrative RBAC policies to imperative programs that simulate the policies both precisely and abstractly and supports several automatic verification back-ends to analyze the resulting programs. In this paper, we describe the architecture of Vac and overview the analysis techniques that have been implemented in the tool. We also report on experiments with several benchmarks from the literature. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.