Finished Projects
Security Infrastructure
ABAC and Trust Negotiation
Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC). The goal of the ABAC project is to overcome problems of granularity and scalability in access control systems. Our approach bases authorization decisions on chains of digitally signed attribute credentials through which credential issuers assert their judgments about the attributes of entities, such as users and organizations. A central issue is that the data contained in credentials is often sensitive and must be protected. In other words, the credentials that must be presented to obtain access are themselves subject to access control. In our approach, requestor and access mediator enter into a bilateral credential exchange, which we call a trust negotiation (TN). The negotiation consists of a sequence of credential exchanges that begin by disclosing credentials that are not sensitive. Each credential transmission seeks to unlock further credentials for transmission. In successful negotiations, the requestor eventually transmits credentials that satisfy the policy governing the desired resource. On-going strategy design work seeks to identify and avoid the potential pitfalls associated with protecting credential content during this process. SPARTA ISSO has a contract to prepare the specification of a negotiation strategy that protects credential content, to implement a preliminary trust negotiation system, to extend the credential-protection strategy to allow empirical evaluation of strategy-design features, and to prepare a methodology for authoring policy and credential contents.
For more information please read the document at the link above or look at the ABAC Quad Chart which provides a one page view including the architecture diagram, new ideas, impact, and schedule.
Advances in Trust Negotiation (ATN). Authenticating a subject's identity doesn't help if the subject is a stranger you've never heard of before. In dynamic coalitions, if authorization decisions are based on subject identity, as organizations enter and leave the coalition, the rate at which identities must be administered by coalition members can become unmanageably large. The ATN project is studying an approach to making application-level authorization decisions without using subject identity by basing those decisions on subject properties that can be mapped to roles without requiring additional information about the subject.
For more information please read the document at the link above or look at the ATN Quad Chart which provides a one page view including the architecture diagram, new ideas, impact, and schedule. The ATN project was completed July, 2001.