Mining roles with semantic meanings

Abstract

With the growing adoption of role-based access control (RBAC) in commercial security and identity management products, how to facilitate the process of migrating a non-RBAC system to an RBAC system has become a problem with significant business impact. Researchers have proposed to use data mining techniques to discover roles to complement the costly top-down approaches for RBAC system construction. A key problem that has not been adequately addressed by existing role mining approaches is how to discover roles with semantic meanings. In this paper, we study the problem in two settings with different information availability. When the only information is user-permission relation, we propose to discover roles whose semantic meaning is based on formal concept lattices. We argue that the theory of formal concept analysis provides a solid theoretical foundation for mining roles from userpermission relation. When user-attribute information is also available, we propose to create roles that can be explained by expressions of user-attributes. Since an expression of attributes describes a real-world concept, the corresponding role represents a real-world concept as well. Furthermore, the algorithms we proposed balance the semantic guarantee of roles with system complexity. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches.

Keywords

security and protection, access controls, information systems, database management, database application, data mining

Date of this Version

2008

Comments

SACMAT '08 Proceedings of the 13th ACM symposium on Access control models and technologies

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