Multimedia-based authorization and access control policy specification

Abstract

Exchanging multimedia objects between wide ranges of distributed applications, web services, and end-users is rapidly increasing in several application domains (medicine, surveillance, e-learning, etc.). In confidential applications, one of the emergent problems to deal with is data authorization and access control. Several textual-oriented authorization models have been provided in the literature. However, multimedia data are more complex in structure and content than textual ones, and thus require new relevant models to provide full multimedia-oriented components specification. In this paper, we address this problem and present a new approach able to improve authorization and access control policies by combining multimedia objects features (shape, color, texture, etc.) with textual descriptors. We also extend the widely used Role Based Access Control (RBAC) model by considering additional concepts useful to improve authorization control, and by integrating different types of possible links between users of different roles to avoid security breaches.