Mining Attribute-based Access Control Policies

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) provides a high level of flexibility that promotes security and information sharing. ABAC policy mining algorithms have potential to significantly reduce the cost of migration to ABAC, by partially automating the development of an ABAC policy from an access control list (ACL) policy or role-based access control (RBAC) policy with accompanying attribute data. This paper presents an ABAC policy mining algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first ABAC policy mining algorithm. Our algorithm iterates over tuples in the given user-permission relation, uses selected tuples as seeds for constructing candidate rules, and attempts to generalize each candidate rule to cover additional tuples in the user-permission relation by replacing conjuncts in attribute expressions with constraints. Our algorithm attempts to improve the policy by merging and simplifying candidate rules, and then it selects the highest-quality candidate rules for inclusion in the generated policy.