XML as a simplified dialect of SGML overcomes the limitations of HTML with a fixed set of tags and thereby allows its users to define their own document structures. In addition, this provides standardized data types taking a form of exchanging data ge...
XML as a simplified dialect of SGML overcomes the limitations of HTML with a fixed set of tags and thereby allows its users to define their own document structures. In addition, this provides standardized data types taking a form of exchanging data generated during managing databases or operating applications in enterprises, by taking advantage of its merit that it can describe meaningful information by itself. Accordingly since there are increasing needs for the efficient management and security of the massive volume of XML data, it is necessary to develop a secure access control mechanism for XML.
The existing access control has not taken information structures and semantics into full account due to the fundamental limitations of HTML. In addition, access control for XML documents allows only read operations, and there exists the problem of slowing down system performance due to the complex authorization evaluation process. Therefore in order to develop a XML access control technique, research on more simple and efficient evaluation engines are required.
In order to resolve this problem, this paper designs and builds a XACMS(XML Access Control Management System) which is capable of making fined-grained access control. For this, it makes more fined-grained access control policies for XML documents than ones designed for HTML documents. And then, in developing an access control system, it describes the subject and object policies of authorization for XML document on which authorization levels should be specified and which access control should be performed. In addition, it is possible to specify authorization constraints for a single XML document and/or DTD. It proposes access authorization policies for XML documents for security, and describes authorization propagation rules and algorithms for XML access control. And also this paper introduces the use of authorization sheets related to DTD and each XML document, proposing the XACMS for XML documents.
The XACMS is recognized by its flexibility, featuring its capability of supporting very fined-grained access protection levels. This provides data only corresponding to its users' authority levels by authorizing them to access only the specific items of XML documents when they're searching XML documents. In order to do this, the XACMS eliminates certain parts of documents which are inaccessible and transmits parts accessible depending on its users' authority levels. It adjusts smoothly the needs of the policy manager of an overall organization and a single document creator, taking owner of access authority for particular XML documents into consideration. Therefore this system can reduce authorization evaluation costs increased by complex and repetitive authorization evaluation practices in the existing access control mechanism.
The proposed XACMS can be used in the environment which XML documents and structures maybe changed. In addition since XML documents are used on the basis of normal web sites, it can be expanded to existing web servers. As the result of experiments, the XACMS can alleviate the problem of slowing down system performance due to the complex authorization evaluation process in the existing access control techniques. Therefore this result indicated that the XACMS proposed in this paper are an improved system compared to existing access control practices.