Extended ReBAC Administrative Models with Cascading Revocation and Provenance Support

Abstract

Relationship-based access control (ReBAC) has been widely studied and applied in the domain of online social networks, and has since been extended to domains beyond social. Using ReBAC itself to manage ReBAC also becomes a natural research frontier, where we have two ReBAC administrative models proposed recently by Rizvi et al.[30] and Stoller[33]. In this paper, we extend these two ReBAC administrative models in order to apply ReBAC beyond online social networks, particularly where edges can have dependencies with each other and authorization for certain administrative operations requires provenance information. Basically, our policy specifications adopt the concepts of enabling precondition and applicability preconditions from Rizvi et al[30]. Then, we address several issues that need to be considered in order to properly execute operation effects, such as cascading revocation and integrity constraints on the relationship graph. With these extended features, we show that our administrative models can provide the administration capability of the MT-RBAC model originally designed for multi-tenant collaborative cloud systems[34].