Seminar title: Infrastructures for Authorization and Access Control

Speaker: Gunther Pernul, University of Regensburg, Germany

Abstract:
In this talk we argue that traditional approaches for authorization and access control in computer systems (i.e., discretionary, mandatory, and role-based access controls) are not appropriate to address the requirements of networked or distributed systems, and that proper authorization and access control requires infrastructural support in one way or another. This support can be provided, for example, by an authentication and authorization infrastructure (AAI). Against this background, we overview, analyze, discuss, and put into perspective some of the current technologies that can be used to build and operate AAIs. A privilege management infrastructure (PMI) is one step further and able to support a comprehensive authorization service. Several new approaches for privilege management have emerged by dynamically controlling the users accesses based on exchanging and evaluating general user characteristics, most notable the attribute-based access control model (ABAC). During the talk we will develop a PMI service model as a reference that includes ABAC functionality and is based on the OASIS XACML specifications and lessons learned from different existing AAIs. Some of our work is carried out within the European research projects FP6 Access-eGov (http://www.accessegov.org ) aiming for a European-wide e-Government service platform and FP7 SPIKE (http://www.spike-project.eu) aiming for the development of a collaboration platform for the networked enterprises.

Biography:
Gunther Pernul received diploma and doctoral degrees both from the University of Vienna, Austria. Currently he is a chaired full professor and managing director of the Department of Information Systems at the University of Regensburg, Germany. His research interests are information systems in general, with currently focus on the information web and information and application security. In these areas he is co-author of a text book, has edited or co-edited ten books, and published more than 100 papers in scientific journals and conference proceedings. Dr. Pernul is a member of ACM, IEEE, GI, OCG, member of the IFIP WG 11.3 and observer of the IFIP WG 11.8 (Security Education). He serves on the steering board of the Communications and Multimedia Security (CMS) and is cofounder of the EC-Web (since 2000) and TrustBus (since 2004) conference series. He has been involved in several research projects on national and international levels. Currently he is acting as principal investigator and coordinator of the European FP7 SPIKE and IPICS and the national funded SecPat projects.