Credential-Based Policies Management in an Access Control Framework Protecting XML Resources

XML has been widely adopted for Web data representation under various applications (such as DBMSs, Digital Libraries etc). Therefore, access to XML data sources has become a crucial issue. In this paper we introduce a credential-based access control framework for protecting XML resources. Under this framework, we propose the use of access policy files containing policies concerning a specific credentials type. Moreover, we propose the reorganization of the policies in these files based on their frequency of use (the more frequently it is used the higher in the file it is placed). Our main goal is to improve request servicing times. Several experiments have been conducted which are carried out either on single request or on multiple requests base. The proposed framework is proven quite beneficial for protecting XML-based frameworks such as digital libraries or any other data resources whose format is expressed in XML.