Relationship-based access control

Abstract

Access control policy is typically defined in terms of attributes, but in many applications it is more natural to define permissions in terms of relationships that resources, systems, and contexts may enjoy. The paradigm of relationshipbased access control has been proposed to address this issue, and modal logic has been used as a technical foundation.We argue here that hybrid logic -a natural and wellestablished extension of modal logic -addresses limitations in the ability of modal logic to express certain relationships.We identify a fragment of hybrid logic to be used for expressing relationship-based access-control policies, show that this fragment supports important policy idioms, and demonstrate that it removes an exponential penalty in existing attempts of specifying complex relationships such as "at least three friends" . We also capture the previously studied notion of relational policies in a static type system.

Survey on Access Control for Community-Centered Collaborative Systems

“…As first noted by Carminati et al [2006], the sole use of direct interpersonal relationships is not flexible enough in denoting authorized users in community-centered systems. Based on this observation, Gates [2007] has introduced a novel access control paradigm based on interpersonal relationships, called Relationship-Based Access Control (ReBAC), and several ReBAC models [Aktoudianakis et al 2013;Bruns et al 2012;Carminati et al 2009;Crampton and Sellwood 2014;Fong et al 2009;Fong et al 2013;] have been proposed since her seminal paper. These models allow the specification of access control policies that employ social relationships as the key factor in access decision making.…”

“…In a social graph, nodes denote the entities within the system and edges denote the interpersonal relationships between those entities. Many ReBAC models like the ones proposed by Bruns et al [2012], Carminati et al [2009 and Crampton and Sellwood [2014], rely on poly-relational social graphs. In these models, social graphs are extended by associating edges with a label indicating the type of relationship between two entities (e.g., friend, colleague, family).…”

“…Differently from modal logic, hybrid logic allows binding a node to a principal in the social graph. This makes it possible to express graded modalities that are necessary for the specification of relationship-based policies such as "access is granted to requesters who have at least k friends in common with the owner" [Bruns et al 2012]. Crampton and Sellwood [2014] propose a generic ReBAC model based on path conditions.…”

Relationship‐based access control: More than a social network access control model

“…A break from that assumption was explicitly made in Cheng, Park, and Sandhu () where the graph also included relations between users and resources, and between resources and resources. In this paper we will call the graph of relationships a protection state after Bruns, Fong, Siahaan, and Huth () to make clear that relations in the protection state are more than social relations. Given a set of object names , C n (which include the names of subjects) and a set binary relationship names , C R , a protection state , , is defined by a set of binary relations over the object names in C N .…”

“…In our example, ( Alice, has _ property, User ) and ( Alice, has _ property, Admin ) will be edges in the protection state. It is problematic for Bruns et al () to capture propositions through relationships because based on the the way they decided to develop their formalization, the protection state has only users as nodes and “social” relationships as the only relationships. User and Admin are not users, and has_property is not a social relationship.…”