Towards a flexible framework to support a generalized extension of XACML for spatio-temporal RBAC model with reasoning ability

Abstract

XACML is an international standard used for access control in distributed systems. However, XACML and its existing extensions are not sufficient to fulfil sophisticated security requirements (e.g. access control based on user’s roles, context-aware authorizations, and the ability of reasoning). Remarkably, X-STROWL, a generalized extension of XACML, is a comprehensive model that overcomes these shortcomings. Among a large amount of open sources implementing XACML, HERAS-AF is chosen as the most suitable framework to be extended to implement X-STROWL model. This paper mainly focuses on the architecture design of proposed framework and the comparison with other frameworks. In addition, a case study will be presented to clarify the work-flow of this framework. This is the crucial contribution of our research to provide a holistic, extensible and intelligent authorization decision engine.