XACML Extension for Graphs: Flexible Authorization Policy Specification and Datastore-independent Enforcement

TL;DR

This paper extends XACML to support flexible, graph-aware authorization policies that consider paths and edges, enabling datastore-independent enforcement for graph-structured data in multi-model databases.

Contribution

It introduces an improved graph-specific policy language and a datastore-independent enforcement method within the XACML framework.

Findings

Enhanced policy language with flexible path definitions

Prototype implementation demonstrating real-case applicability

Discussion on performance outlook

Abstract

The increasing use of graph-structured data for business- and privacy-critical applications requires sophisticated, flexible and fine-grained authorization and access control. Currently, role-based access control is supported in graph databases, where access to objects is restricted via roles. This does not take special properties of graphs into account such as vertices and edges along the path between a given subject and resource. In previous iterations of our research, we started to design an authorization policy language and access control model, which considers the specification of graph paths and enforces them in the multi-model database ArangoDB. Since this approach is promising to consider graph characteristics in data protection, we improve the language in this work to provide flexible path definitions and specifying edges as protected resources. Furthermore, we introduce a method for a datastore-independent policy enforcement. Besides discussing the latest work in our XACML4G model, which is an extension to the Extensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML), we demonstrate our prototypical implementation with a real case and give an outlook on performance.