Role-Based Access Control in Enterprises

Introduction

The growth of intelligent environments is never regarded as a science fiction and has, instead, become one of the active areas in research. This means that the development of technology, the progress as well as increased information would ultimately have an impact on the enterprises. Notably, the growing complexity of the functions behind the designs seems to be strategic for many enterprises that are eyeing to reap from thousands of the business operations. The immediate issues that demands attention is security where a security system is highly needed to protect the information from any possible external attacks or threats. The most significant stage of data protection across the information system lies with creation of the high level model that would satisfy the security of the system. Apparently, one basic concept behind the protection models revolves around the access control. The latter plays a significant role limiting the operations or actions that users can execute. Access control systems or mechanisms introduce the role concepts that reside with Mandatory Access Control type (MAC) and Discretionary Access Control type (DAC). On the other hand, The Role Based Access Control (RBAC) model defines user’s access to significant information on the basis of the activities that need to be performed. While other mechanisms are said to still play a critical role in the industry, the report will squarely narrow down to the Role Based Access Control method. First, the report will work on the details of RBAC method including the key features. Then the report will proceed to assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the RBAC mechanism when it comes to efficient security management, assess the cryptograph method felt better for keeping confidential data on local servers, and lastly, work on the recommendations of using the RBAC and the convenient cryptography method.

The RBAC Method

The RBAC method is largely regarded as an approach meant to restrict the system access especially to the unauthorized users. RBAC is majorly applied by most of the enterprises having over 500 employees and has a capacity of deploying either the discretionary access control or the mandatory access control. Notable components of the RBAC like user role, role permissions and the role-role relationships are known to make it simple in terms of performing the user assignments (Elsayed et al. 2016). RBAC is sometimes regarded as an attempt that tries all means of reducing the gap through a combination of the forced organizational constraints associated with the flexibility of the explicit authorizations. This mechanism is effective in the sense that it controls the type of the information users who can utilize the computer or the programs allowed for users to execute, as well as changes that users are allowed to make. Across the RBAC roles, users are said to be assigned statistically. However, it is also difficult to make changes on the access rights without necessarily changing specific roles of the users. Notably, RBAC draws preference to the access control model meant for the local domain (Siponen et al. 2007). Besides, role is deemed nothing apart from the abstraction of the behaviours of the users and the assigned duties. Such roles are applicable in assigning the system resources to significant departments as well as the relevant members. Importantly, the RBAC policies are compelled to take note of the roles with each defined in terms of a set of actions as well as responsibilities attached to a specific working activity. Based on the Access control security model, it can be noted that a role would be regarded as a job associated with the access rights that can be channelled to the authorized users across the organization.

In the face of the fading Access Control List (ACL), RBAC is seen to be gaining momentum as a result of the consistent hierarchy across many organizations. With the potential of accommodating grouping and hierarchy, RBAC is seen to be more efficient as well as easy to maintain when comparisons are drawn to ACL approach (Hu et al. 2006). The Operability of RBAC is essentially based on three basic rules. The first one is the role assignment where a subject is allowed to execute the transaction when the subject has either been assigned a role or selected for a role. Under this rule, both the authentication and identification processes are never regarded as transactions. However, other user activities noted on the system can only be conducted via transaction. The second rule revolves around role authorization where the active role of a subject needs to be authorized for the specific subject. This means that users are only allowed to take roles that authorized for them. The last rule is that of transaction authorization in which a subject is allowed to execute a transaction when the transaction itself is authorized for the active role assigned to the subject. The three rules make RBAC to centrally administer security. However, the model remains flexible when taking on the organizational characteristics that appear in terms of structure and policy. The greatest virtue associated with RBAC revolves around the administrative capabilities that the model supports. This means that the moment a transaction is prompted; a role is established in the system (Elsayed et al. 2016). Therefore, the administrative task constitutes granting as well as revoking membership within given sets of the named roles across the system. Apart from the roles and transactions, it should equally be noted that the RBAC model taxonomy comprises of the four models, which include the core RBAC, static constrained RBAC, hierarchical RBAC and the dynamic constrained RBAC. The core RBAC would cover the key features noted across all RBAC system (Ubale Swapnaja et al. 2014). This would include set of features that differentiates the RBAC from rest forms of the authorization management systems. However, the hierarchical RBAC would only add an extra concept that revolves around the role hierarchy. On the other hand, the constrained RBAC comprises of the static as well as dynamic SOD properties while the statically constrained RBAC would only add constraint relations which are imposed on the role assignment relations.

Strengths and weaknesses of RBAC mechanism in terms of efficient security management

The Role Based Access Control is said to be a widely accepted ACM meant for security management. With the RBAC model, the user can play focal roles while different roles can be assigned to different users. Notably, permission assignments cannot be assigned to the users but instead, such permissions are assigned to roles. It can still be noted that for different roles, the significant enterprises are compelled to define the most corresponding and relevant information security management policies (Hu et al. 2006). In a nutshell, when users within the sales and purchasing department can access the internet, other users either in the manufacturing or human resource department who would still need to make use of the internet but are required to adhere to the information security management policies assigned to their respective department. With all restrictions in the course of access control management, the assessment of RBAC is essentially based on its performance in the scope of security management. In this regarded, it is always perfect to take note of the strengths and weaknesses of the RBAC mechanism while at use. Several areas of strength can be realized while making use of RBAC for security management. First, RBAC is known for facilitating the efficient access management. While assessing the RBAC in terms of efficient access management, two assumptions have to be considered. The first assumption is that users are never supposed to acquire permissions due to the individual attributes (Poniszewska-Maranda 2011). However, users are supposed to share the profiles which would in turn define their respective roles. The second assumption is that the role structure as well as the set of permissions linked to different roles need to be stable. The only change should be on the users as well as their roles assigned within a given period of time (Franqueira and Wieringa 2012). This can still be integrated with the fact that number of roles need to be lesser compared to the users, a condition that grants permission. If the two conditions are true, then administration of the permissions should be efficient with respect to time as well as effort. Apparently, role management need to engage frequent deletion of the assignments, eventual updates and the reassignment of the user role. Efficiency, in this case, implies the ease of use as well as the translation into economic benefits associated to this mechanism.

The second area of strength for RBAC entails the efficient and effective enforcement of the need to know and understand. This is where the principle of least privilege is applied for the purposes of ensuring the required level of security. The fundamental purpose of the need-to-know principle resides with the fact that users are neither over-titled nor under-titled in the course of their interaction with the system (Wu and Yu 2013). Such a measure overseas or avoids instances where users are issued with less permissions compared to their roles or duties performed. When cases of less permission are noted, there are chances that this would have a severe impact on the productivity and give leap way to users who would end up circumventing the problem and even lead to security risks. Therefore, the need-to-know principle is in itself a powerful tool that makes RBAC to be effective when dishing out permissions. The third area of strength when making use of RBAC for security management is the flexibility of the semantics associated with the permissions as well as roles. Significantly, almost no restrictions are prompted by the mode as regards the semantics of the permissions and the relevant roles. However, this implies that most of these semantics need to be defined and determined through a special process referred to as role engineering. For instance, when the RBAC is used by an operating system, most of the roles end up being coarse-grained while referring to the users’ classes as agreed across the network administrators. Nevertheless, flexible roles are imminent when RBAC is used in the stand-alone business applications, cross enterprise applications as well as enterprise-wide applications. Another area of strength includes a robust role hierarchy that gives room for scalable inheritance of legit permissions. However, when role hierarchy is mission, one is still allowed to duplicate the permissions with respect to the assignment roles. Another alternative entails allowing users to accumulate permissions through the role assignment. This means an increase in the count of the user-role assignments (Siponen et al. 2007). Apart from this, RBAC enjoys the simplified regulatory compliance due to the fact that the model facilitates auditing. This means that RBAC gives room for the most convenient way of managing as well as documenting user permissions as a result of the visibility of permissions. Therefore, RBAC is more effective in demonstrating or showcasing adherence to security details as established by such regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPAA, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and Gramm-Leach Bliley Act among others.

Apart from RBAC sharing dominant areas of strength, the model also suffers from a number of weaknesses. The RBAC model is vulnerable to interoperability issues, which double as both managerial and role engineering problem. This results into ambiguous semantics due to the fact that the standards never posit any specifics thereby leaving behind the semantic gap (Siponen et al. 2007). Under interoperability issues, the model also suffers from multiple interpretations. It is worth noting that the RBAC standard is seen to be complex, an element that makes it subject to debates. In this regard, the role concept is only considered as intuitive which gives loopholes for adoption of RBAC even without observing the standards. The second weakness observed with RBAC entails the role engineering problem, commonly denoted as role explosion. This problem emanates from the complex nature of the user attributes (Franqueira and Wieringa 2012). First, the notion of individuality may lead to users bearing same roles to have dissimilar sets of permissions. The second cause of the role explosion entails the locality where various users have same functional role but bear dissimilar permissions based on the geographic locations. Different developers have also hinted to the fact that dynamic context-dependent constraints may also lead to role explosion while utilizing the RBAC model. Cases where the system encounters locality, individuality and particularities, there are high chances the dynamic constraints can boost the roles to impractical levels (Hu et al. 2006). Another area of weakness when applying the RBAC model revolves around the role hierarchy and the unplanned or unexpected side-effects. Notably, any hierarchy is expected to meet the bottom-up rule. However, in some cases, the complex hierarchies largely emanate from rampant cases of under-entitlement or over-entitlement. Such cases may call for technical attention from special teams and this is deemed expensive especially when the system is more sophisticated. Lastly, the RBAC suffers from rigidity, which is equally a role management problem. The problem of rigidity emanates from the conflicting requirements of need-to-share and need-to-know as far as compliance and security perspectives are put into consideration.

Cryptography method for keeping the data confidential on the local servers

While observing efficient security performance of different methods, the confidentiality of the local servers equally remains a critical issue as far as data security is put into consideration. Two key cryptography methods are commonly put in place to ensure confidentiality of the local servers. First, the symmetric encryption entails a single secret key used to cipher as well as decipher the information or data in the local servers. Symmetrical encryption is commonly regarded as the old but best-known method (Agrawal and Mishra 2012). The requirement for symmetric encryption demands both the sender as well as the recipient need to understand the secret key applied in encrypting as well as decrypting the messages or any form of data. Common examples of symmetric encryption include Blowfish, RC5, AES, RC6 and DES among others. Common algorithms include AE-256, AES-128 and AE-192. On the other hand, the Asymmetrical encryption, commonly referred to as public key cryptography, is the updated and newest version when compared to the symmetric counterpart (Barukab et la. 2012). The Asymmetric type makes use of two keys when encrypting the plain text. Significantly, the secret keys are usually exchanged via the internet in case of a large network. The method ensures that the malicious people or parties do not get a chance of misusing the keys. The two keys foster boosting the security by ensuring that the malicious parties have to access the two before deciphering a message (Belguith et al. 2015). The two keys include the pubic key, which is freely available, while the second one is the private key which is commonly kept confidential to the sending and receiving parties. In most applications, the asymmetric key is regarded to have a better power in assuring the required security of data that is transmitted during communication.

The assessment of the two methods, in the effort to determine the most convenient for confidentiality of the local servers, can be based on the aspect of confidentiality, integrity, authentication as well as identification. In terms of confidentiality, it is a basic requirement that communication from the sending end need to be secured against any tapping. In this case, the symmetric cryptographic algorithms are highly recommendable over the asymmetric counterparts. This is due to the fact that most of the symmetric cryptographic systems are known for high speed encryption as well as low cipher expansion rates (Tripathi and Agrawal 2014). However, the asymmetric cryptographic algorithm would still be used in providing a secured key transformation for the software package. In terms of authentication and identification, it is well thought that digital signatures are better placed in ensuring validity of the origin of data. This feature is only possible with asymmetric cryptographic algorithm, which is used in conjunction with the hashing algorithm (Narendra et al. 2012). Besides, the integrity problem can also be handled using the hashing function, which works close with the asymmetric encryption. Generally, the asymmetric cryptography method shows a better performance due to its digital taste and the capacity of ensuring secure encrypted communication. However, asymmetric cryptography method is deemed slow with three orders of magnitude. When assessing the two methods, one would be lured to pick on asymmetric cryptography method for the confidentiality of the local servers (Chandra et al. 2014). Such a choice would only be right if the analysis is based on the overall performance. In really sense, confidentiality is best achieved by making use of the symmetric encryption. However, this does not imply that the asymmetric option should be ignored given that it performs better when used in securing the key distribution.

Recommendation

The discussion engages the wide view of The RABC Access Control Mechanism by looking at the features, performance and even the models that can be identified under RBAC. The same attention has been channelled to the assessment of its strengths and weakness at the same time. Besides, the confidentiality of the local servers prompted a comparison of the symmetric and asymmetric cryptography methods. Based on the assessment, the following can be recommended.

For the enterprises that aid efficient security management of the system, then RBAC method is the ultimate deal that would achieve efficient access management, simplified regulatory compliance and avail flexible semantics of both the permissions and roles once implemented.

For confidentiality of the server, the symmetric encryption is better placed due to the fact that subsequent algorithms are faster, stronger and have the capability of availing shorter keys when compared to the asymmetric counterpart.

Conclusion

To sum up, the discussion has looked at the RBAC method as one of the access control mechanisms that is currently used by almost every enterprise. An overview of this mechanism further dug deep into the flexibility of the authorizations, which as an advantage served by the RBAC method. The report has equally assessed the strengths and weaknesses of RBAC where it could be seen that the model offers efficient access management, and flexible semantics among other advantages. It equally suffered from role explosions among other problems. The report further assessed the potential of the symmetric and asymmetric encryptions against the confidentiality of the local servers. It could be noted that symmetric encryption stood a better chance in meeting the requirement.

References

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