Interactive access control for autonomic systems

Abstract

Autonomic communication and computing is a new paradigm for dynamic service integration over a network. An autonomic network crosses organizational and management boundaries and is provided by entities that see each other just as partners. For many services no autonomic partner may guess a priori what will be sent by clients nor clients know a priori what credentials are required to access a service. To address this problem we propose a new interactive access control : servers should interact with clients, asking for missing credentials necessary to grant access, whereas clients may supply or decline the requested credentials. Servers evaluate their policies and interact with clients until a decision of grant or deny is taken. This proposal is grounded in a formal model on policy-based access control. It identifies the formal reasoning services of deduction, abduction and consistency. Based on them, the work proposes a comprehensive access control framework for autonomic systems. An implementation of the interactive model is given followed by system performance evaluation.