Application of Attribute Based Access Control Model for Industrial Control Systems

Abstract

The number of reported security vulnerabilities and incidents related to the industrial control systems (ICS) has increased recent years. As argued by several researchers, authorization issues and poor access control are key incident vectors. The majority of ICS are not designed security in mind and they usually lack strong and granular access control mechanisms. The attribute based access control (ABAC) model offers high authorization granularity, central administration of access policies with centrally consolidated and monitored logging properties. This research proposes to harness the ABAC model to address the present and future ICS access control challenges. The proposed solution is also implemented and rigorously tested to demonstrate the feasibility and viability of ABAC model for ICS.