An attribute-based protection model for JSON documents

Abstract

There has been considerable research in specifying authorization policies for XML documents. Most of these approaches consider only hierarchical structure of underlying data. They define authorization policies by directly identifying XML nodes in the policies. These approaches work well for hierarchical structure but are not suitable for other required characteristics we identify in this paper as semantical association and scatteredness. This paper presents an attribute based protection model for JSON documents. We assign security-label attribute values to JSON elements and specify authorization policies using these values. By using securitylabel attribute, we leverage semantical association and scatteredness properties. Our protection mechanism defines two types of policies called authorization and labeling policies. We present an operational model to specify authorization policies and different models for defining labeling policies. Finally, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept for the proposed models in the Swift service of OpenStack IaaS cloud.