Invited Talk 2 - Ed Dawson (QUT, Australia)

Authorisation Models for Dynamic Environments

Traditional authorisation models such as RBAC are based on the implicit assumption that an administrator can anticipate the legitimate access needs of users and pre-define an access policy that allocates privileges accordingly. However, as business, government and industry become increasingly information-intensive and interconnected, they exhibit a level of dynamism that seriously challenges the validity of this assumption. This talk will review the motivation for developing authorisation models that can respond to unanticipated changes in users' operational needs without requiring the intervention of an administrator. It will review a number of recent proposals that seek to explicitly include a notion of risk to achieve more flexible access decision making. Finally it will present some of our own work that draws on insights from the field of economics and the insurance literature to deliver an authorisation model where users can acquire unassigned permissions while limiting their power to misuse this dynamic capability.