Object Security Attributes: Enabling Application-Specific Access Control in Middleware

Abstract

Abstract. This paper makes two primary contributions toward establishing support for application-specific factors in middleware security mechanisms. First, it develops a simple classification framework for reasoning about the architecture of the security mechanisms in distributed applications that follow the decision-enforcement paradigm of the reference monitor. It uses the framework to demonstrate that the existing solutions lack satisfying tradeoffs for a wide range of those applications that require application-specific factors to be used in security decisions while mediating access requests.Second, by introducing attribute function in addition to decision and enforcement functions, it proposes a novel scheme for clean separation among suppliers of middleware security, security decision logic, and application-logic, while supporting application-specific protection policies. To illustrate the scheme on a concrete example, we describe its mapping into CORBA Security.

Experience Report: Design and Implementation of a Component-Based Protection Architecture for ASP.NET Web Services

“…As it was argued in [2], the use of target attributes reduces the need for mixing authorization and other security logic with business logic. These application-specific attributes and the mechanism for obtaining them at run time are directly based on the prior work on Attribute Function [2,18].…”

“…These application-specific attributes and the mechanism for obtaining them at run time are directly based on the prior work on Attribute Function [2,18]. The extensible retrieval mechanism is designed as a replaceable TargetAttributeRetriever interface, with a simple implementation provided by the architecture implementation.…”

“…The architecture's flexibility and extensibility have been achieved through a component-based design that follows the architectural styles of RAD [4,5,17] and Attribute Function [2]. This architecture has been implemented in a real-world security solution.…”

“…These properties were achieved via 1. separating custom SOAP [21] extension modules, which act as ASP.NET-specific A&A enforcement logic, from the A&A decision logic; 2. following Resource Access Decision (RAD) architecture style [4,5,17], which, through the decomposition of the authorization engine into components, makes the customization of access control decision logic easier and avoids the need for a generic policy evaluation engine; 3. taking advantage of the extensibility, inheritance, and caching features of ASP.NET web.config configuration mechanism; and 4. separating the logic of retrieving attributes from the authorization and business logic by following the Attribute Function (AF) approach [2]. Although this paper discusses the design of a protection architecture for Web services, we believe that our approach and design decisions could be useful in a broader context of component-based protection sub-systems for distributed applications.…”

Here’s Your LegoTM Security Kit: How to Give Developers All Protection Mechanisms They Will Ever Need

“…The use of target attributes reduces the need for mixing authorization and other security logic with business logic. These applicationspecific attributes and the mechanism for obtaining them are directly based on our prior work on Attribute Function (AF) [33,34], overview of which is provided in Appendix B. 4.…”