Decision Diagrams for XACML Policy Evaluation and Management

• Published in: Computers & security 2015-03, Vol.49, p.1-16
• Main Authors: Ngo, Canh, Demchenko, Yuri, de Laat, Cees
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Access control; Authorization; Decision diagram; Decision making models; Diagrams; Extensible Markup Language; Interval partition processing; Policy evaluation; Semantics; Studies; XACML
• ISSN: 0167-4048; 1872-6208
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cose.2014.11.003

One of the primary challenges to apply the XACML access control policy language in applications is the performance problem of policy evaluation engines, particularly when they experience a great number of policies. Some existing works attempted to solve this problem, but only for some particular use-cases: either supporting simple policies with equality comparisons or predefined attribute values. Due to the lack of carefully checking the XACML model, they did not have original policy evaluation semantics. Therefore, they cannot handle errors containing indeterminate decisions, or ignore the critical attribute setting that leads to potential missing attribute attacks. In this paper, we build up the XACML logical model and propose a decision diagram approach using the data interval partition aggregation. It can parse and transform complex logical expressions in policies into decision tree structures, which efficiently improve the policy evaluation performance. Our approach can also be applied to solve other policy management problems such as policy redundancy detection, policy testings and comparisons, or authorization reverse queries.