Access control role evolution mechanism for open computing environment

Abstract

Data resources in open computing environments (including big data, internet of things and cloud computing) are characterized by large scale, wide source, and strong dynamics. Therefore, the user-permission relationship of open computing environments has a huge scale and will be dynamically adjusted over time, which enables effective permission management in the role based access control (RBAC) model to become a challenging problem. In this paper, we design an evolution mechanism of access control roles for open computing environments. The mechanism utilizes the existing user-permission relationship in the current system to mine the access control role and generate the user-role and role-permission relationship. When the user-permission relationship changes, the roles are constantly tuned and evolved to provide role support for access control of open computing environments. We propose a novel genetic-based role evolution algorithm that can effectively mine and optimize roles while preserving the core permissions of the system. In addition, a role relationship aggregation algorithm is proposed to realize the clustering of roles, which provides a supplementary reference for the security administrator to give the role real semantic information. Experimental evaluations in real-world data sets show that the proposed mechanism is effective and reliable.