Supporting Agile Development of Authorization Rules for SME Applications

Custom SME applications for collaboration and workflow have become affordable when implemented as Web applications employing Agile methodologies. Security engineering is still difficult with Agile development, though: heavy-weight processes put the improvements of Agile development at risk. We propose Agile security engineering and increased end-user involvement to improve Agile development with respect to authorization policy development. To support the authorization policy development, we introduce a simple and readable authorization rules language implemented in a Ruby on Rails authorization plugin that is employed in a real-world SME collaboration and workflow application. Also, we report on early findings of the language’s use in authorization policy development with domain experts.