Support for discretionary role based access control in ACL-oriented operating systems

Abstract

The implementation of discretionary role-based access control mechanisms in standard operating systems like Unix suffers from the inability of the system to allow a user to restrict his processes' control over his own objects. By exploiting the user's access rights trojan horses, possibly hidden in downloaded executable content, can undermine the access control policy to perform their malicious tasks. This paper presents an approach to restrict the rights of processes by switching between hierarchically organized user defined subdomains with simple system calls. These domains can be used to implement certain discretionary role based access control policies.