Decentralized user-role assignment for Web-based intranets

Abstract

The intricacy of security administration is one of the most challenging problems in large networked systems. This problem is especially serious in the Web environment, which consists of synthesis of technologies and composition of various constituents. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) can reduce the complexity and cost of security administration in large networked applications. Using RBAC itself to manage RBAC provides additional administrative convenience. The main contribution of this paper is to extend the RBAC/Web system (developed at NIST) with the URA97 model for user-role assignment (developed at GMU) to decentralize the details of RBAC administration on the Web without losing central control over the system policy.