ACGreGate: A Framework for Practical Access Control for Applications using Weakly Consistent Databases

TL;DR

ACGreGate is a Java framework designed to enable correct and scalable access control in applications that use weakly consistent databases, ensuring security policies are maintained without sacrificing performance or scalability.

Contribution

The paper introduces ACGreGate, a novel framework that provides correct access control for weakly consistent data stores, addressing security concerns in scalable, high-availability systems.

Findings

ACGreGate effectively enforces security policies with minimal overhead.

The framework maintains correctness of access control under weak consistency models.

Using ACGreGate improves scalability compared to centralized solutions.

Abstract

Scalable and highly available systems often require data stores that offer weaker consistency guarantees than traditional relational databases systems. The correctness of these applications highly depends on the resilience of the application model against data inconsistencies. In particular regarding application security, it is difficult to determine which inconsistencies can be tolerated and which might lead to security breaches. In this paper, we discuss the problem of how to develop an access control layer for applications using weakly consistent data stores without loosing the performance benefits gained by using weaker consistency models. We present ACGreGate, a Java framework for implementing correct access control layers for applications using weakly consistent data stores. Under certain requirements on the data store, ACGreGate ensures that the access control layer operates correctly with respect to dynamically adaptable security policies. We used ACGreGate to implement the access control layer of a student management system. This case study shows that practically useful security policies can be implemented with the framework incurring little overhead. A comparison with a setup using a centralized server shows the benefits of using ACGreGate for scalability of the service to geo-scale.