Proceedings of the 4th OWLED Workshop on OWL: Experiences and Direction

Role Based Access Control and OWL

Tim Finin, Anupam Joshi, Lalana Kagal, Jianwei Niu, Ravi Sandhu, William H Winsborough, and Bhavani Thuraisingham

April 1, 2008

Current access control research follows two parallel themes: many efforts focus on developing novel access control models meeting the policy needs of real-world application domains, while others are exploring new policy languages. This paper is motivated by the desire to develop a synergy between these themes facilitated by OWL. Our vision for the future is a world where advanced access control concepts are embodied in models that are supported by policy languages in a natural, intuitive manner, while allowing for details beyond the models to be further specified in the policy language. In this paper, we specifically study the relationship between the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the Role Based Access Control (RBAC) model. Although OWL is a web ontology language and not specifically designed for expressing authorization policies, it has been used successfully for this purpose in previous work such as KAoS and Rei. We show two different ways to support the NIST Standard RBAC model in OWL and then discuss how the OWL constructions can be extended to model attribute-based RBAC or, more generally, attribute-based access control.

BibTeX OWL Tweet Scholar

Tags: ai, knowledge graph, ontology, owl, rbac, security, semantic web, semantic

Type: InProceedings

Publisher: CEUR Workshop Proceedings

Organization: CEUR

Kendall Clark and Peter Patel-Schneider

Volume: 496

Downloads: 3414 downloads