Generic Access Control Model and Semantic Mapping Between Heterogeneous Policies

Genericness Of Access Control Model Concepts

The abstraction of access control involves three elements of access control systems (Samarati & Capitani, 2001):

• 1.

  The policy that defines the high-level rules according to which access control is regulated;

• 2.

  The model that provides a formal representation of the access control policies and tries to ensure a level of abstraction over the access control components;

• 3.

  The mechanism that defines the low-level functions that implement the controls imposed by the policy and formally stated in the model.

Several models for access control exist in the literature such as IBAC (Shen & Dewan, 1992), RBAC (Sandhu, Coyne, Feinstein, & Youman, 1996), ABAC (Yuan & Tong, 2005), etc. In (Haguouche & Jarir, 2015b), we studied access control models characterized by innovative elements or abstractions to describe access control policies. Thereafter we identified four main common entities: