An Approach for Generation of J2EE Access Control Configurations from Requirements Specification

Abstract

Access control of sensitive resources is a widely used means to achieve information security. When building large-scale systems based on popular commercial component middleware, such as J2EE, a usual way to enforce access control is to define access control configurations for components in a declarative manner. These configurations can be interpreted by the J2EE security service to grant or deny access requests to components. However, it is difficult for the developers to define correct access control configurations according to complex and sometimes ambiguous real-world access control requirements. The difficulties come from mainly the complexity of configuring voluminous component methods in large-scale component based systems and some quality constraints on the configurations, for example, the completeness, consistency and performance overhead of configurations. In this paper, we propose a requirements model driven approach for automatic generation of J2EE access control configurations and demonstrate the approach in a J2EE blueprint application.