Reasoning about Relation Based Access Control

Relation Based Access Control (RelBAC) is an access control model that places permissions as first class concepts. Under this model, we discuss in this paper how to formalize typical access control policies with Description Logics. Important security properties, i.e., Separation of Duties (SoD) and Chinese Wall are studied and formally represented in RelBAC. To meet the needs of automated tools for administrators, we show that RelBAC can formalize and answer queries about access control requests and administrative checks resorting to the reasoning services of the underlying Description Logic.