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R-What? Development of a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) Policy-Writing Tool for e-Scientists
Sacha Brostoff, M Angela Sasse, David Chadwick, James Cunningham, Uche Mbanaso, and Sassa Otenko
Software: Practice and Experience, 35(9):182-196, July 2005.Abstract
A lightweight role-based access control policy authoring tool was developed for e- Scientists, a community where access policies have to be implemented for an increasingly heterogeneous group of local and remote users. Two fundamental problems were identified (1) lack of understanding what the policy components are (i.e. how authorization policies are structured), and (2) lack of understanding of the underlying policy paradigm (i.e. what should go into the policy, and what should be left out). Conceptual design (CD) techniques were used to revise the user interface (UI) labels so that e-Scientists and developers were better able to describe access policy components from labels, and match labels with components (t=6.28, df=7, p=.000 two tailed). CD, instructional text, bubble help, UI behaviour and alert boxes were used to shape users? models of the policy paradigm. The final prototype improved users? efficiency and effectiveness by: more than doubling the speed with which expert users could write authorization policies; and facilitating users without specialist security knowledge to overcome the policy paradigm and components problems, enabling them to complete 80% of basic and 75% of advanced authorization policy writing tasks in a usability trial.
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@article{2275,
author = {Sacha Brostoff and M Angela Sasse and David Chadwick and James Cunningham and Uche Mbanaso and Sassa Otenko},
title = {{R-What? Development of a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) Policy-Writing Tool for e-Scientists}
},
month = {July},
year = {2005},
pages = {182-196},
keywords = {determinacy analysis, Craig interpolants},
note = {},
doi = {},
url = {http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2005/2275},
publication_type = {article},
submission_id = {7331_1131360249},
journal = {Software: Practice and Experience},
volume = {35},
number = {9},
}