The central components of spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) are Geo Web Services. These services provide functionalities that allow distributed users to use and manage spatial data. Various business rules, legal restrictions and commercial interests require the deployment of access control systems in SDIs. These systems must ensure that only authorized interactions between users and services ...

Ideally, access control to resources in complex IT systems ought to be handled by business decision makers who own a given resource (e.g., the pay and benefits section of an organization should decide and manage the access rules to the payroll system). To make this happen, the security and database communities need to develop vendor-independent access management tools, useable by decision maker...

The adoption of XACML as the standard for specifying access control policies for various applications, especially web services is vastly increasing. A policy evaluation engine can easily become a bottleneck when enforcing large policies. In this paper we propose an adaptive approach for XACML policy optimization. We proposed a clustering technique that categorizes policies and rules within a po...

The trustworthiness of sensitive data needs to be guaranteed and testing is a common activity among privacy protection solutions, even if quite expensive. Accesses to data and resources are ruled by the PDP (Policy Decision Point), which relies on the XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) standard language for specifying access rights. In this paper, we propose a testing strategy fo...

With the prevalence of loosely coupled web service composition in the service oriented infrastructure, distributed security management has become important to offer flexible web security. In our project affiliated with NatureServe [2], we developed a XACML [3, 4] policy oriented security system to provide trust data service to 75 network partners in the Natural Heritage Program [1]. A Horn Logi...

Policy-based software architectures are nowadays widely exploited to regulate different aspects of systems’ behavior, such as access control, resource usage, and adaptation. Several languages and technologies have been proposed as, e.g., the standard XACML. However, developing real-world systems using such approaches is still a tricky task, being them complex and error-prone. To overcome such d...

1. Automated Reasoning about Web Access Control Policies via Answer Set Programming Gail-Joon Ahn*, Joohyung Lee*, Hongxin Hu and Yunsong Meng Summary: We introduce a logic-based policy management approach for XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language), which has become the defacto standard for specifying and enforcing access control policies for various applications and services in curr...

The paper summarises the recent and on-going developments and discussions in the Grid security community to built interoperable and scalable AuthZ infrastructure for distributed applications. The paper provides a short overview of the XACML policy format and policy obligations definition in the XACML specification. The paper analyses the basic use cases for obligations in computer Grids and on-...

Web services are independently written and managed, each with its own access control policy, thus it is challenging to control the access to the information they own. A particularly difficult case occurs when a service invokes another service to satisfy an initial request. We call this ”Transitive access problem”. To tackle this issue, we propose to use XACML for defining Attribute based Access...