Toward a generic access control model

Organizations in a collaborative environment expose their services to an external usage which requires more preoccupation with security issues. Access control is one of these required security concerns. Several access control models are defined in the literature and this multitude of models creates heterogeneity of access control systems between the collaborating organizations. And this is manifested in the policy definition languages as well as in the enforcement mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a generic model of access control that allows defining each authorization rule in an abstract manner (high level language). These abstract policies can be mapped into low level concrete policies written according to the model adopted by the organization. The abstraction of the access control will involve elements of access control systems that are: models, policies and mechanisms.