Role Mining to Assist Authorization Governance: How Far Have We Gone?

Abstract

The concept of role has revolutionized the access control systems by making them more efficient and by simplifying their management. Role mining is the discipline of automating the definition of roles in a given access control system. It is a vivid research area, which has attracted a growing interest in the last years. Research on role mining has produced several interesting contributions in this field, and has also raised several related issues toward leveraging them in actual enterprises. This paper is a comprehensive analysis of the main research directions around role mining and the future trends. The authors present the problem of role mining, the current achievements to solve it and the related open issues. With this objective, they define a complete and realistic business process for Role Mining, and the authors sequentially analyze the issues related to each step of the process by investigating the main contributions in the literature. They also point the unhandled issues and we highlight the future perspectives.