An actor-based, application-aware access control evaluation framework

To date, most work regarding the formal analysis of access control schemes has focused on quantifying and comparing the expressive power of a set of schemes. Although expressive power is important, it is a property that exists in an *absolute* sense, detached from the application context within which an access control scheme will ultimately be deployed. By contrast, we formalize the access control *suitability analysis problem*, which seeks to evaluate the degree to which a set of candidate access control schemes can meet the needs of an application-specific workload. This process involves both reductions to assess whether a scheme is *capable* of implementing a workload (qualitative analysis), as well as cost analysis using ordered measures to quantify the *overheads* of using each candidate scheme to service the workload (quantitative analysis). We formalize the two-facet suitability analysis problem, which formally describes this task. We then develop a mathematical framework for this type of analysis, and evaluate this framework both formally, by quantifying its efficiency and accuracy properties, and practically, by exploring an academic program committee workload.