The Design and Demonstration of an Actor-Based, Application-Aware Access Control Evaluation Framework
This work addresses the need for application-aware evaluation of access control schemes, which is incremental as it builds on existing formal analysis by focusing on practical suitability rather than just expressive power.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating how well access control schemes meet application-specific needs, formalizing the suitability analysis problem and developing a framework that assesses both capability and overhead, demonstrating it on a group-based messaging workload with quantified efficiency and accuracy properties.
To date, most work regarding the formal analysis of access control schemes has focused on quantifying and comparing the expressive power of a set of schemes. Although expressive power is important, it is a property that exists in an absolute sense, detached from the application-specific context within which an access control scheme will ultimately be deployed. In this paper, by contrast, we formalize the access control suitability analysis problem, which seeks to evaluate the degree to which a set of candidate access control schemes can meet the needs of an application-specific workload. This process involves both reductions to assess whether a scheme is capable of implementing a workload, as well as cost analysis using ordered measures to quantify the overheads of using each candidate scheme to service the workload. We develop a mathematical framework for analyzing instances of the suitability analysis problem, and evaluate this framework both formally (by quantifying its efficiency and accuracy properties) and practically (by exploring a group-based messaging workload from the literature). An ancillary contribution of our work is the identification of auxiliary machines, which are a useful class of modifications that can be made to enhance the expressive power of an access control scheme without negatively impacting the safety properties of the scheme.