Formal foundations for hybrid hierarchies in GTRBAC

Abstract

A role hierarchy defines permission acquisition and role-activation semantics through role--role relationships. It can be utilized for efficiently and effectively structuring functional roles of an organization having related access-control needs. The focus of this paper is the analysis of hybrid role hierarchies in the context of the generalized temporal role-based access control (GTRBAC) model that allows specification of a comprehensive set of temporal constraints on role, user-role, and role-permission assignments. We introduce the notion of uniquely activable set (UAS) associated with a role hierarchy that indicates the access capabilities of a user resulting from his membership to a role in the hierarchy. Identifying such a role set is essential, while making an authorization decision about whether or not a user should be allowed to activate a particular combination of roles in a single session. We formally show how UAS can be determined for a hybrid hierarchy. Furthermore, within a hybrid hierarchy, various hierarchical relations may be derived between an arbitrary pair of roles. We present a set of inference rules that can be used to generate all the possible derived relations that can be inferred from a specified set of hierarchical relations and show that it is sound and complete . We also present an analysis of hierarchy transformations with respect to role addition, deletion, and partitioning, and show how various cases of these transformations allow the original permission acquisition and role-activation semantics to be managed. The formal results presented here provide a basis for developing efficient security administration and management tools.