An empirical assessment of approaches to distributed enforcement in role-based access control (RBAC)

We consider the distributed access enforcement problem for Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) systems. Such enforcement has become important with RBAC's increasing adoption, and the proliferation of data that needs to be protected. We assess six approaches, each of which has either been proposed in the literature, or is a natural candidate for access enforcement. The approaches are: directed graph, access matrix, authorization recycling, cpol, Bloom filter and cascade Bloom filter. We consider encodings of RBAC sessions in each, and propose and justify a benchmark for the assessment. We present our results from an empirical assessment of time, space and administrative efficiency based on the benchmark. We conclude with inferences we can make regarding the best approach to access enforcement for particular RBAC deployments based on our assessment.