Contributing to Current Challenges in Identity and Access Management with Visual Analytics

Abstract

Enterprises have embraced identity and access management (IAM) systems as central point to manage digital identities and to grant or remove access to information. However, as IAM systems continue to grow, technical and organizational challenges arise. Domain experts have an incomparable amount of knowledge about an organization's specific settings and issues. Thus, especially for organizational IAM challenges to be solved, leveraging the knowledge of internal and external experts is a promising path. Applying Visual Analytics (VA) as an interactive tool set to utilize the expert knowledge can help to solve upcoming challenges. Within this work, the central IAM challenges with need for expert integration are identified by conducting a literature review of academic publications and analyzing the practitioners' point of view. Based on this, we propose an architecture for combining IAM and VA. A prototypical implementation of this architecture showcases the increased understanding and ways of solving the identified IAM challenges.

Optimization of Access Control Policies

“…A key factor for understandable ACPs is semantic meaningfulness. Moreover, several authors proposed approaches for visualizing ACPs, which aim to improve the understandability of an ACP set without applying any changes to it (Puchta et al, 2019).…”

“…Cheminod et al (2018) showcase this behavior for an industrial use case. However, ABAC has still not reached the maturity of RBAC and has difficulties with practical adoption (Servos and Osborn, 2017;Puchta et al, 2019). Most issues of ABAC are rooted in the raised flexibility of attributes and ABAC policies which backfire as increased complexity and thus are less comprehensive for administrators and policy engineers (Servos and Osborn, 2017).…”