An MDA approach to Access Control Specifications Using MOF and UML Profiles

We present a Model Driven Development (MDD) approach to the development of access control policies for distributed systems. The models are expressed as Meta-Object Facility (MOF) models enriched by Unified Modeling Language (UML) profiles. The view-based access control model is used as an example, for which we present a platform independent meta-model and platform specific meta-models for the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). A management application is used to build instance models for the platform independent and platform specific meta-models, respectively.We present in this paper how the platform independent models can be used to generate the platform specific models, and how the meta-models can be used to generate the models for the specific application. Finally, the platform specific models are used to generate the security policy to be deployed in the security infrastructure.We show how consistence requirements can be verified formally by using category-based graph transformations.