Model-Driven integration and analysis of Access-control policies in Multi-layer information systems

Abstract

Security is a critical concern for any information system. Security properties such as confidentiality, integrity and availability need to be enforced in order to make systems safe. In complex environments, where information systems are composed of a number of heterogeneous subsystems, each must participate in their achievement. Therefore, security integration mechanisms are needed in order to 1) achieve the global security goal and 2) facilitate the analysis of the security status of the whole system. For the specific case of access-control, access-control policies may be found in several components (databases, networks and applications) all, supposedly, working together in order to meet the high level security property. In this work we propose an integration mechanism for access-control policies to enable the analysis of the system security. We rely on model-driven technologies and the XACML standard to achieve this goal.