Scalable automated symbolic analysis of administrative role-based access control policies by SMT solving 1

Abstract

Administrative Role Based Access Control (ARBAC) is one of the most widespread framework for the management of access-control policies. Several automated analysis techniques have been proposed to help maintaining desirable security properties of ARBAC policies. One of the main limitation of available analysis techniques is that the set of users is bounded. In this paper, we propose a symbolic framework to overcome this limitation. We design an automated analysis technique that can handle both a bounded and an unbounded number of users by adapting recent methods for the symbolic model checking of infinite state systems that use first-order logic and SMT solving techniques. An extensive experimental evaluation confirms the scalability of the proposed technique.