Skip to main content

Designing Efficient XACML Policies for RESTful Services

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Book cover Web Services, Formal Methods, and Behavioral Types (WS-FM 2014, WS-FM 2015)

Abstract

The popularity of REST grows more and more and so does the need for fine-grained access control for RESTful services. Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) is a very generic concept that generalizes multiple different access control mechanisms. XACML is an implementation of ABAC based on XML and is established as a standard solution. Its flexibility opens the opportunity to specify detailed security policies. But on the other hand it has some drawbacks regarding maintenance and performance when the complexity of security policies grows. Long processing times for authorization requests are the consequence in environments that require fine-grained access control. We describe how to design a security policy in a resource oriented environment so that its drawbacks are minimized. The results are faster processing times for access requests and a guideline to structure security policies for RESTful services easing their maintenance.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 34.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 44.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/wso2/balana.

References

  1. Brachmann, E., Dittmann, G., Schubert, K.: Simplified authentication and authorization for RESTful services in trusted environments. In: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing, ESOCC 2012 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Cormen, T., Leiserson, C., Rivest, R., Stein, C.: Introduction to Algorithms. MIT Press, Cambridge (2001)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  3. Cubera, D., Epstein, A.: Fast difference and update of XML documents. In: XTech 1999 (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Fielding, T.R.: Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures. University of California, Irvine (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standard. eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) Version 3.0. OASIS Standard (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Graf, S., Zholudev, V., Lewandowski, L., Waldvogel, M.: Hecate, managing authorization with RESTful XML. In: WS-REST 2011 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Hüffmeyer, M., Schreier, U.: An attribute based access control model for RESTful services. In: SummerSOC 2015 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Internet Engineering Task Force. Hypertext Transfer Protocol - HTTP/1.1. RFC 2616 (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Liu, A., Chen, F., Hwang, J., Xie, T.: Xengine: a fast and scalable XACML policy evaluation engines. In: SIGMETRICS 2008 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Liu, A., Chen, F., Hwang, J., Xie, T.: Designing fast and scalable XACML policy evaluation engines. IEEE Trans. Comput. 60, 1802–1817 (2011)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  11. Lorch, M., Kafura, D., Shah, S.: An XACML-based policy management and authorization service for globus resources. In: GRID 2003 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Marouf, F., Shehab, M., Squicciarini, A., Sundareswaran, S.: Adaptive reordering and clustering-based framework for efficient XACML policy evaluation. IEEE Trans. Serv. Comput. 4, 300–313 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Miseldine, P.: Automated XACML policy reconfiguration for evaluation optimisation. In: SESS 2008 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Ros, S., Lischka, M., Marmol, F.: Graph-based XACML evaluation. In: SACMAT 2012 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Sandhu, D.: The authorization leap from rights to attributes: maturation or chaos? In: SACMAT 2012 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Shen, H., Hong, F.: An attribute based access control model for web services. In: Parallel and Distributed Computing, Applications and Technologies, PDCAT 2006 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Sun, F., Xu, L., Su, Z.: Static detection of access control vulnerabilities in web applications. In: Proceedings of the 20th USENIX Conference on Security, SEC 2011 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Wang, Y., DeWitt, D., Cai, J.: X-diff: an effective change detection algorithm for XML documents. In: ICDE 2003 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Yuan, E., Tong, J.: Attributed based access control (ABAC) for web services. In: IEEE International Conference on Web Services, ICWS 2005 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marc Hüffmeyer .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Hüffmeyer, M., Schreier, U. (2016). Designing Efficient XACML Policies for RESTful Services. In: Hildebrandt, T., Ravara, A., van der Werf, J., Weidlich, M. (eds) Web Services, Formal Methods, and Behavioral Types. WS-FM WS-FM 2014 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9421. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33612-1_6

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33612-1_6

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-33611-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-33612-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics