RBAC support in object-oriented role databases

‘I’hc research on object-oriented role databases has bccoiiif~ a,ctive recc>ntly. Parallel to this, the concept of roles have also been proposed in the context of access control and security management. It is interesting to irrvestigate whether the role concept proposed in these two di flerent contexts can be unified. This paper proposes the framework for ot)ject-orietlt,ed role database syst,ems which can be used as the basis for specifying and implementing rob-based access control (RHAC). The paper firstly surveys the state of the art in object-oriented role database concepts and models. To do this, we summarize our recently proposed object-oriented role database called DOOR., which includes most of the features of existing objt:ct-orierlted role systems. We then describe the authorization and security mechanisms of DOOR., and how to support RBAC with these mechanisms. In particular, we emphasize the RHAC issues to support authorization changes during object evolution.