A write abortion-based protocol in role-based access control systems

Abstract

In information systems, data in an object may illegally flow into another object if transactions manipulate the objects. In our previous studies, the read-abortion-based role-based synchronisation (RA-RBS) and object-based synchronisation (RA-OBS) protocols are discussed to prevent illegal information flow in the role-based access control (RBAC) model. Illegal read operations mean read operations which might imply illegal information flow. Here, transactions which issue illegal read operations are aborted. In this paper, we consider a unique object whose data is not allowed to flow to another object. An illegal write is defined to be a write operation which a transaction issues after reading a unique object or illegally reading an object. Each transaction reads objects but is aborted if the transaction illegally writes an object. Two types of write-abortion (WA)-based synchronisation protocols WA-RBS and WA-OBS are discussed based on abortions of transactions issuing illegal write operations. In the evaluation, the number of transactions aborted can be more reduced in the WA protocols than the RA protocols.