Information System Organization
In traditional access control models the approach for granting access to resources within a particular system or an application is to specify permission for each of the user separately. If the user is allowed to have access to multiple resources or information within a system, the user must be assigned permissions for each of the resource. This approach is tricky and not the most reliable way of implementing access control. When users join, leave or change responsibilities within an organization, each of the users who changes status within the organization that user's access privileges information must be updated for each of the permissions. Achieving the above requires a lot of resources, time and also is prone to errors as an organization can have hundreds of thousands of employees and updating each of the users information one by one is not an efficient way. RBAC get rids of this problem because it takes advantage of the user's role as the key to access rather than the user's identification.
The basis for role-based model is the user-role and permission-role relationships. Each user in a role-based environment may be assigned to multiple roles, and each role may have multiple users as well. The roles that are assigned to a user depend on their job and responsibilities, and each role is assigned permissions according to role's access privileges in the organization. Permissions determine the data and applications that may be accessed by which are also assigned to a role and that role is assigned to a user or multiple users. User's role can be in many forms e.g. jobs like (bank teller, bank manager), geographic locations (London, Newcastle) or individuals (shift supervisor, managers). The advantage of using this model is that users keep changing within the organization whereas on the other hand roles or job responsibilities for a particular role remain the same. Therefore rather than implementing the security on the user's manually, roles are created which are assigned to users and any addition in a job specification is changed in the role description which in turn changes the all the user with that role.
RBAC is a technology that offers an alternative to traditional discretionary access control (DAC) and mandatory access control (MAC) policies. RBAC allows companies to specify and enforce security policies that map naturally to the organization's structure. That is, the natural method for assigning access to information in a company is based on the individual's need for the information, which is a function of his job, or role, within the organization. RBAC allows a security administrator to use the natural structure of the organization to implement and enforce security policy. This model decreases the cost of network administration while improving the enforcement of network security policies.
RBAC is designed to centrally manage privileges by providing layers of abstractions that are mapped one-to-many to real users and real operations and real resources. Managing permissions in terms of the abstractions reduces complexity and provides visualization and a context for implementing complex access control policies. Abstractions can be centrally managed resulting in real permissions on real systems.
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