PolyOrBAC: An Access Control Model for Inter-Organizational Web Services

Abstract

With the emergence of Web Services-based collaborative systems, new issues arise, in particular those related to security. In this context, Web Service access control should be studied, specified and enforced. This work proposes a new access control framework for Inter-Organizational Web Services: “PolyOr- BAC”. On the one hand, the authors extend OrBAC (Organization-Based Access Control Model) to specify rules for intra- as well as inter-organization access control; on the other hand, they enforce these rules by applying access control mechanisms dedicated to Web Services. Furthermore, the authors propose a runtime model checker for the interactions between collaborating organizations, to verify their compliance with previously signed contracts. In this respect, not only their security framework handles secure local and remote accesses, but also deals with competition and mutual suspicion between organizations, controls the Web Service workflows and audits the different interactions. In particular, every deviation from the signed contracts triggers an alarm, the concerned parties are notified, and audits can be used as evidence for a judge to sanction the party responsible for the deviation.