Specifying access control policies for XML documents with XPath

Abstract

Access control for XML documents is a non-trivial topic, as can be witnessed from the number of approaches presented in the literature. Trying to compare these, we discovered the need for a simple, clearand unambiguous language to state the declarative semantics of an access control policy. All current approaches state the semantics in natural language, which has none of the above properties. This makes it hard to assess whether the proposed algorithms are correct (i.e., really implement the described semantics). It is also hard to assess the proposed policy on its merits, and to compare it to others (for file systems for instance). This paper shows how XPath can be used to specify the semantics of an access control policy for XML documents. Using XPath has great advantages: it is standard technology, widely used and it has clear and easy syntax and semantics. We use the developed framework to give a formal specification of the five most prominent approaches of access controlfor XML documents from the literature.