Automated and efficient analysis of administrative temporal RBAC policies with role hierarchies

Abstract

Temporal role-based access control models support the specification and enforcement of several temporal constraints on role enabling, role activation, and temporal role hierarchies among others. In this paper, we define three mappings that preserve the solutions to a class of policy problems: they map security analysis problems in presence of static temporal role hierarchies to problems without them. We show how our mappings can be used to extend the capabilities of a tool for the analysis of administrative temporal role-based access control policies to reason in presence of temporal role hierarchies. We carried out an experimental evaluation with a prototype implementation, which highlighted that one of the proposed mappings behaves better than the other two. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first tool capable of reasoning with (static) temporal role hierarchies.