학술논문

An Automatic Attribute-Based Access Control Policy Extraction From Access Logs
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing IEEE Trans. Dependable and Secure Comput. Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on. 19(4):2304-2317 Aug, 2022
Subject
Computing and Processing
Authorization
Computational modeling
Unsupervised learning
Organizations
Data mining
Biological system modeling
Medical services
Access control
attribute based access control
policy mining
policy engineering
machine learning
clustering
Language
ISSN
1545-5971
1941-0018
2160-9209
Abstract
With the rapid advances in computing and information technologies, traditional access control models have become inadequate in terms of capturing fine-grained, and expressive security requirements of newly emerging applications. An attribute-based access control (ABAC) model provides a more flexible approach to addressing the authorization needs of complex and dynamic systems. While organizations are interested in employing newer authorization models, migrating to such models pose as a significant challenge. Many large-scale businesses need to grant authorizations to their user populations that are potentially distributed across disparate and heterogeneous computing environments. Each of these computing environments may have its own access control model. The manual development of a single policy framework for an entire organization is tedious, costly, and error-prone. In this article, we present a methodology for automatically learning ABAC policy rules from access logs of a system to simplify the policy development process. The proposed approach employs an unsupervised learning-based algorithm for detecting patterns in access logs and extracting ABAC authorization rules from these patterns. In addition, we present two policy improvement algorithms, including rule pruning and policy refinement algorithms to generate a higher quality mined policy. Finally, we implement a prototype of the proposed approach to demonstrate its feasibility.