ABSTRACT

In the previous chapter, we examined confidentiality and integrity policies, which permit access based in part on principals’ and objects’ classification levels. In many organizations, however, access-control policies are based instead upon employees’ job functions: for example, programmers must have both read and write access to relevant source code, while salespeople may require access to internal marketing reports. Role-based access control (RBAC) was designed to simplify the task of managing such policies by explicitly introducing a notion of roles, which serve as intermediate links between users (i.e., employees) and permissions (i.e., their required access rights).