Extending Access Control Models with Break-glass

by Achim D. Brucker and Helmut Petritsch

Cover for brucker.ea:extending:2009.Access control models are usually static, i.e., permissions are granted based on a policy that only changes seldom. Especially for scenarios in health care and disaster management, a more flexible support of access control, i.e., the underlying policy, is needed.

Break-glass is one approach for such a flexible support of policies which helps to prevent system stagnation that could harm lives or otherwise result in losses. Today, break-glass techniques are usually added on top of standard access control solutions in an ad-hoc manner and, therefore, lack an integration into the underlying access control paradigm and the systems' access control enforcement architecture.

We present an approach for integrating, in a fine-grained manner, break-glass strategies into standard access control models and their accompanying enforcement architecture. This integration provides means for specifying break-glass policies precisely and supporting model-driven development techniques based on such policies.

Keywords: disaster management, access-control, break-glass, model-driven security
Categories: ,
Documents: (full text as PDF file) (slides) (handout)

QR Code for brucker.ea:extending:2009.Please cite this article as follows:
Achim D. Brucker and Helmut Petritsch. Extending Access Control Models with Break-glass. In ACM symposium on access control models and technologies (SACMAT), pages 197-206, ACM Press, 2009.
Keywords: disaster management, access-control, break-glass, model-driven security
(full text as PDF file) (BibTeX) (Endnote) (RIS) (Word) (doi:10.1145/1542207.1542239) (ACM) (Share article on LinkedIn. Share article on CiteULike. )

BibTeX
@InCollection{ brucker.ea:extending:2009,
abstract = {Access control models are usually static, i.e., permissions are granted based on a policy that only changes seldom. Especially for scenarios in health care and disaster management, a more flexible support of access control, i.e., the underlying policy, is needed.\\\\Break-glass is one approach for such a flexible support of policies which helps to prevent system stagnation that could harm lives or otherwise result in losses. Today, break-glass techniques are usually added on top of standard access control solutions in an ad-hoc manner and, therefore, lack an integration into the underlying access control paradigm and the systems' access control enforcement architecture.\\\\We present an approach for integrating, in a fine-grained manner, break-glass strategies into standard access control models and their accompanying enforcement architecture. This integration provides means for specifying break-glass policies precisely and supporting model-driven development techniques based on such policies.},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
author = {Achim D. Brucker and Helmut Petritsch},
booktitle = {ACM symposium on access control models and technologies (SACMAT)},
copyright = {ACM},
copyrighturl = {http://dl.acm.org/authorize?175073},
doi = {10.1145/1542207.1542239},
editor = {Barbara Carminati and James Joshi},
isbn = {978-1-60558-537-6},
keywords = {disaster management, access-control, break-glass, model-driven security},
location = {Stresa, Italy},
pages = {197--206},
pdf = {https://www.brucker.ch/bibliography/download/2009/brucker.ea-extending-2009.pdf},
publisher = {ACM Press},
talk = {talk:brucker.ea:extending:2009},
title = {Extending Access Control Models with Break-glass},
url = {https://www.brucker.ch/bibliography/abstract/brucker.ea-extending-2009},
year = {2009},
}