Towards trustworthy delegation in role-based access control model

Abstract

The need to delegate, which allows the temporary grant or transfer of access rights, arise in many applications. Although a lot of research appears in extending Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to support delegation, not much appears on providing a formal basis for choosing delegatees. We provide an approach that allows one to assess the trustworthiness of potential delegatees in the context of the task that is to be delegated. It is also important to ensure that the choice of the delegatee does not cause any security policy violation. Towards this end, we show how to formally analyze the application using existing SAT solvers to get assurance that our choice of delegatee does not cause a security breach. Once the process of choosing delegatee can be formalized, it will be possible to automate delegation and use it for real-time applications. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.