Title
PolTree: A Data Structure for Making Efficient Access Decisions in ABAC
Abstract
In Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC), a user is permitted or denied access to an object based on a set of rules (together called an ABAC Policy) specified in terms of the values of attributes of various types of entities, namely, user, object and environment. Efficient evaluation of these rules is therefore essential for ensuring decision making at on-line speed when an access request comes. Sequentially evaluating all the rules in a policy is inherently time consuming and does not scale with the size of the ABAC system or the frequency of access requests. This problem, which is quite pertinent for practical deployment of ABAC, surprisingly has not so far been addressed in the literature. In this paper, we introduce two variants of a tree data structure for representing ABAC policies, which we name as PolTree. In the binary version (B-PolTree), at each node, a decision is taken based on whether a particular attribute-value pair is satisfied or not. The n-ary version (N-PolTree), on the other hand, grows as many branches out of a given node as the total number of possible values for the attribute being checked at that node. An extensive experimental evaluation with diverse data sets shows the scalability and effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3322431.3325102
Proceedings of the 24th ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies
Keywords
Field
DocType
abac, access decision, attribute-value pair, policy tree
Data mining,Data structure,Data set,Software deployment,Computer science,Tree (data structure),Access control,Binary number,Scalability
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-6753-0
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ronit Nath100.34
Saptarshi Das220228.99
Shamik Sural3100896.36
Jaideep Vaidya42778171.18
Vijayalakshmi Atluri53256424.98