RBAC in UNIX administration

Abstract

This paper describes an implementation of RBAC for UNIX systems in which roles are used as an alternative to the traditional supermel: Roles are special shared accounts which must be formally assumed by authorized users. Each role has a full set of credentials so that it can be authenticated and authorized by existing administrative services. Rather than providing for hierarchical roles, the permissions associated with roles are expressed hierarchically using execution profiles. Extensible attributes for users, roles, and permissions are maintained in distributed databases which can support multiple security policies simultaneously.