Role-Based Access Control for Distributed Cooperation Environment

The development of Internet has made cooperation among distributed organizations become a reality. Access control in such distributed cooperation environment is a challenge problem as new environment introduces new requirements. Considerable recent works incorporate RBAC into distributed cooperation environment by role mapping; however, role mapping approach has a number of problems, such as security violation problems and access permission leakage. In this paper, we proposed a role-based access control model called RBAC-DC to meet new requirements of distributed cooperation environment. In stead by role mapping, RBAC-DC achieves cooperation by service providing domain providing roles, permissions of those roles and user-role assignment privilege of those roles to service requesting domain. Besides, RBAC-DC disables transitivity of access permissions among domains. RBAC-DC achieves the goal of meeting new requirements of distributed cooperation environment, and has a set of properties compared to role mapping approach, such as maximizing degree of cooperation and more control power.