Lico: A Lightweight Access Control Model for Inter-Networking Linkages

• Main Authors: Simin Li, Wei Ren, Tianqing Zhu, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2018-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Access control; privilege management; privilege transitivity; graph theory; process management
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8466580/

Processes in operating systems are assigned different privileges to access different resources. A process may invoke other processes whose privileges are different; thus, its privileges are expanded (or escalated) due to such improper “inheritance.”Inter-networking can also occur between processes, either transitively or iteratively. This complicates the monitoring of inappropriate privilege assignment/escalation, which can result in information leakage. Such information leakage occurs due to privilege transitivity and inheritance and can be defined as a general access control problem for inter-networking linkages. This is also a topic that is generally less studied in existing access control models. Specifically, in this paper, we propose a lightweight directed graph-based model, LiCo, which is designed to facilitate the authorization of privileges among inter-networking processes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first general access control model for inter-invoking processes and general inter-networking linkages.