domRBAC: An access control model for modern collaborative systems

Modern collaborative systems such as the Grid computing paradigm are capable of providing resource sharing between users and platforms. These collaborations need to be done in a transparent way among the participants of a virtual organization (VO). A VO may consist of hundreds of users and heterogeneous resources. In order to have a successful collaboration, a list of vital importance requirements should be fulfilled, viz. collaboration among domains, to ensure a secure environment during a collaboration, the ability to enforce usage constraints upon resources, and to manage the security policies in an easy and efficient way. In this article, we propose an enhanced role-based access control model entitled domRBAC for collaborative applications, which is based on the ANSI INCITS 359-2004 access control model. The domRBAC is capable of differentiating the security policies that need to be enforced in each domain and to support collaboration under secure inter-operation. Cardinality constraints along with context information are incorporated to provide the ability of applying simple usage management of resources for the first time in a role-based access control model. Furthermore, secure inter-operation is assured among collaborating domains during role assignment automatically and in real-time. Yet, domRBAC, as an RBAC approach, intrinsically inherits all of its virtues such as ease of management, and separation of duty relationships with the latter also being supported in multiple domains. As a proof of concept, we implement a simulator based on the definitions of our proposed access control model and conduct experimental studies to demonstrate the feasibility and performance of our approach.