An Integrated Approach for Identity and Access Management in a SOA Context

An Integrated Approach for Identity and Access Management in a SOA Context

Abstract

In this paper, we present an approach for identity and access management (IAM) in the context of (cross-organizational) service oriented architectures (SOA). In particular, we defined a domain-specific language (DSL) for role-based access control (RBAC) that allows for the definition of IAM policies for SOAs. For the application in a SOA context, our DSL environment automatically produces WS-BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web services) specifications from the RBAC models defined in our DSL. We use the WS-BPEL extension mechanism to annotate parts of the process definition with directives concerning the IAM policies. At deployment time, the WS-BPEL process is instrumented with special activities which are executed at runtime to ensure its compliance to the IAM policies. The algorithm that produces extended WS-BPEL specifications from DSL models is described in detail. Thereby, policies defined via our DSL are automatically mapped to the implementation level of a SOA-based business process. This way, the DSL decouples domain experts' concerns from the technical details of IAM policy specification and enforcement. Our approach thus enables (non-technical) domain experts, such as physicians or hospital clerks, to participate in defining and maintaining IAM policies in a SOA context. Based on a prototype implementation we also discuss several performance aspects of our approach.

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Authors
  • Hummer, Waldemar
  • Gaubatz, Patrick
  • Strembeck, Mark
  • Zdun, Uwe
  • Dustdar, Schahram
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Shortfacts
Category
Paper in Conference Proceedings or in Workshop Proceedings (Paper)
Event Title
16th ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT)
Divisions
Software Architecture
Subjects
Computersicherheit
Software Engineering
Programmiersprachen
Webentwicklung, Webanwendungen
Event Location
Innsbruck, Austria
Event Type
Conference
Event Dates
15-17 Jun 2011
Publisher
ACM
Date
June 2011
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