RBAC is an access control model that reduces the administration overhead compared to other traditional access control models. In RBAC, permissions are assigned directly to roles, and then roles are assigned to users. As a result, permissions can change without changing user authorization.
Published in Chapter:
Improving the Information Security of Collaborative Web Portals via Fine-Grained Role-Based Access Control
S. Demurjian (University of Connecticut, USA), H. Ren (University of Connecticut, USA), S. Berhe (University of Connecticut, USA), M. Devineni (Serebrum Cooperation, USA), Sushil Vegad (Serebrum Cooperation, USA), and K. Polineni (Serebrum Cooperation, USA)
Copyright: © 2010
|Pages: 19
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-384-5.ch024
Abstract
Collaborative portals are emerging as a viable technology to allow groups of individuals to easily author, create, update, and share content via easy-to-use Web-based interfaces, for example, MediaWiki, Microsoft’s Sharepoint, and so forth. From a security perspective, these products are often limited and coarse grained in their authorization and authentication. For example, in a Wiki, the security model is often at two ends of the spectrum: anonymous users with no authorization and limited access via readonly browsing vs. registered users with full-range of access and limited oversight in content creation and modification. However, in practice, such full and unfettered access may not be appropriate for all users and for all applications, particularly as the collaborative technology moves into commercial usage (where copyright and intellectual property are vital) or sensitive domains such as healthcare (which ushave stringent HIPAA requirements). In this chapter, we report on our research and development effort of a role-based access control for collaborative Web portals that encompasses and realizes security at the application level, the document level (authoring and viewing), and the look-and-feel of the portal itself.