Role-based privilege and trust management

Abstract

Abstract. The Internet provides tremendous connectivity and information sharing capability which organizations can use for their competitive advantage. However, we still observe security challenges in Internet-based applications, especially in terms of their limited support for controlled access to organizational resources and information for unknown users. Roles can be a convenient construct for expressing entitled privileges and trust degree alike, based upon which further specification of responsibility and capability is made so as to facilitate trust-based authorization for such an environment. In this article, we design a role-based privilege and trust management by leveraging a role-based trust model and a privilege management infrastructure, as an attempt to develop an easyto-use, flexible, and interoperable authorization mechanism for unknown users. Also, we demonstrate the feasibility of our mechanism by providing a proof-of-concept prototype implementation using commercial off-the-shelf technologies. 1