Specification and Analysis of ABAC Policies in a Rule-Based Framework

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) is an access control paradigm whereby access rights to system resources are granted through the use of policies that are evaluated against the attributes of entities (user, subject, and object), operations, and the environment relevant to a request. Many ABAC models, with different variations, have been proposed and formalized. Since the access control policies that can be implemented in ABAC have inherent rule-based specifications, it is natural to adopt a rule-based framework to specify and analyse their properties. We describe the design and implementation of a software tool implemented in Mathematica. Our tool makes use of the rule-based capabilities of a rule-based package developed by us, can be used to specify configurations for the foundational model ABAC $$_{\alpha }$$ of ABAC, and to check safety properties.