Reachability Analysis for Attributes in ABAC with Group Hierarchy

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the reachability of user attributes in hierarchical ABAC models, introducing a restricted GURAG scheme and providing complexity results and algorithms for attribute reachability.

Contribution

It defines a restricted GURAG scheme for attribute reachability analysis and establishes its PSPACE-complete complexity, along with polynomial algorithms for special cases.

Findings

Reachability analysis is PSPACE-complete for general rGURAG schemes.

Polynomial-time algorithms are available for certain restricted rGURAG instances.

The study advances understanding of attribute inheritance and administrative control in ABAC models.

Abstract

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) models are widely used to provide fine-grained and adaptable authorization based on the attributes of users, resources, and other relevant entities. Hierarchial group and attribute based access control (HGABAC) model was recently proposed which introduces the novel notion of attribute inheritance through group membership. GURAG was subsequently proposed to provide an administrative model for user attributes in HGABAC, building upon the ARBAC97 and GURA administrative models. The GURA model uses administrative roles to manage user attributes. The reachability problem for the GURA model is to determine what attributes a particular user can acquire, given a predefined set of administrative rules. This problem has been previously analyzed in the literature. In this paper, we study the user attribute reachability problem based on directly assigned attributes of the user and attributes inherited via group memberships. We first define a restricted form of GURAG, called rGURAG scheme, as a state transition system with multiple instances having different preconditions and provide reachability analysis for each of these schemes. In general, we show PSPACE-complete complexity for all rGURAG schemes. We further present polynomial time algorithms to solve special instances of rGURAG schemes under restricted conditions.