Model-driven adaptive delegation

Abstract

Model-Driven Security is a specialization of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) that focuses on making security models productive, i.e., enforceable in the final deployment. Among the variety of models that have been studied in a MDE perspective, one can mention access control models that specify the access rights. So far, these models mainly focus on static definitions of access control policies, without taking into account the more complex, but essential, delegation of rights mechanism. User delegation is a meta-level mechanism for administrating access rights, which allows a user without any specific administrative privileges to delegate his/her access rights to another user. This paper analyses the main hard-points for introducing various delegation semantics in model-driven security and proposes a model-driven framework for 1) specifying access control, delegation and the business logic as separate concerns; 2) dynamically enforcing/weaving access control policies with various delegation features into security-critical systems; and 3) providing a flexibly dynamic adaptation strategy. We demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed solution through the proof-of-concept implementations of different systems.