Mutual Authorizations: Semantics and Integration Issues

Abstract

Studies in fields like psychology and sociology have revealed that reciprocity is a powerful determinant of human behavior. None of the existing access control models however captures this reciprocity phenomenon. In this paper, we introduce a new kind of grant, which we call mutual, to express authorizations that actually do this, i.e., users grant access to their resources only to users who allow them access to theirs. We define the syntax and semantics of mutual authorizations and show how this new grant can be included in the Role-Based Access Control model, i.e., extend RBAC with it.