RBAC emulation on trusted DG/UX

One goal of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) research is to identify generally applicable mechanisms that are sufficiently flexible to support RBAC behavior in diverse applications. This paper discusses three candidate mechanisms that are available in DG/UX@ B2 Security Option, a high security commercial off-the-shelfoperating system. Quite a bit of RBAC semantics can be achieved by simply setting the system’s site-configurable policy parameters. Additional RBAC features, such as dynamic role management, can be realized with modest amounts of site-written software. To improve manageability, an RRAC presentation layer can also be added to the site-extensible administration interface. The effort required to retain the high security assurances of the underlying operating system, using these mechanisms, ranges from none to reasonable.