Policy analysis for administrative role based access control without separate administration

Access control is widely used in large systems for restricting resource access to authorized users. In particular, role based access control (RBAC) is a generalized approach to access control and is well recognized for its many advantages in managing authorization policies. This paper considers user-role reachability analysis of administrative role based access control (ARBAC), which defines administrative roles and specifies how members of each administrative role can change the RBAC policy. Most existing works on user-role reachability analysis assume the separate administration restriction in ARBAC policies. While this restriction greatly simplifies the user-role reachability analysis, it also limits the expressiveness and applicability of ARBAC. In this paper, we consider analysis of ARBAC without the separate administration restriction and present new techniques to reduce the number of ARBAC rules and users considered during analysis. We also present a number of parallel algorithms that speed up the analysis on multi-core systems. The experimental results show that our techniques significantly reduce the analysis time, making it practical to analyze ARBAC without separate administration.