An Aspect-Oriented Approach to Declarative Access Control for Web Applications

Chen, Kung; Lin, Chu-Chuan

doi:10.1007/11610113_17

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 7 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…[6,12,15,19,27,28]), since security constraints may be specified or coded orthogonally with respect to the functional part of the system.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A transformation contract to generate aspects from access control policies

Braga

2010

Softw Syst Model

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Access control is an important security issue. It has been addressed since the late 1960s in the early timesharing computer systems. Many access control models have been proposed since than but of particular interest is Ferraiolo and Khun's role-based access control model (RBAC). It is a simple and yet general model which has been deeply studied and applied both in industry and in academia. A variety of industrial standards have been proposed based on this model. Generating code for an access control policy is an interesting challenge. Understanding access control as a nonfunctional concern that cross-cuts the functional part of a system raises difficulties quite suitable for a solution based on aspect-oriented programming. In this paper, we address the problems of specification and validation of code generation for access control policies targeting an aspect-based infrastructure. We propose an MDA approach. The code generator is a transformation from SecureUML, an RBAC-based modeling language, to the language Aspects for Access Control (AAC), an aspect-oriented modeling language proposed in this paper. Metamodels are used to represent the languages and to specify the transformation. A metamodel is used to represent the abstract syntax of a language and the constraints that a given instance model of the metamodel must fulfill. This paper is dedicated with affection to the memory of Vinicius Braga. Communicated byWe also use a metamodel to specify the code generator. This transformation metamodel, together with all the constraints, that is, from both languages and those constraints regarding the merge of the two languages, we call a transformation contract. It merges and conservatively extends the source and target metamodels of the model transformation it represents. In the context of code-generation for access control policies, the transformation contract specifies the relationships between the abstract syntaxes of SecureUML and AAC and constrains the two languages. The validation of the code generator also uses the transformation contract. For a given access control policy and aspect, represented as instances of the appropriate metamodels, with aspects produced by the code generator, the constraints of the transformation contract must hold. We have prototyped a transformer from Secure-UML to aspects on top of ITP/OCL, an OCL interpreter that automatically validates the generated aspect code by applying the constraints of the transformation contract.

show abstract

“…[6,12,15,19,27,28]), since security constraints may be specified or coded orthogonally with respect to the functional part of the system.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A transformation contract to generate aspects from access control policies

Braga

2010

Softw Syst Model

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In [21] the authors use aspect-oriented modeling to specify access control concerns. In [6] the focus is on web applications. The authors propose an aspect-oriented approach to declarative access control for web applications.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Access Control Policies to an Aspect-Based Infrastructure: A Metamodel-Based Approach

Braga

2009

Models in Software Engineering

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. Security is among the most successful applications of aspectoriented concepts. In particular, in role-based access control, aspects capture access conditions in a quite modular way. The question we address in this paper is how can aspects be generated from access control policies under a validated process? We present a metamodel-based transformation from SecureUML, a rolebased access control language, to an abstract aspect language. Within this model-driven engineering context, a security policy is represented as an instance of SecureUML's metamodel and the generated aspect is represented as an instance of the abstract aspect language metamodel. Invariants specified on the merged metamodel of SecureUML and the abstract aspect language are checked to validate the generated aspect with respect to the given security policy. We have prototyped our approach as a Java application on top of IT-P/OCL, a rewriting-based OCL evaluator. It outputs validated AspectJ code from a SecureUML policy.

show abstract