Uniform application-level access control enforcement of organizationwide policies

Abstract

Fine-grained and expressive access control policies on application resources need to be enforced in application-level code. Uniformly enforcing a single policy (referred to as the organizationwide policy) in diverse applications is challenging with current technologies. This is due to a poor delimitation of the responsibilities of application deployer and security officer, which hampers a centralized management of a policy and therefore compromises the uniformity of its enforcement. To address this problem, the concept of an access interface is introduced as a contract between an organization-wide authorization engine and the various applications that need its services. The access interface provides support for the central management of the policy by the security officer. By means of a view connector, the application deployer ensures that each application complies with this contract, so that the policy can be enforced