An Algorithmic Approach to Authorization Rules Conflict Resolution in Software Security

Conflicts can occur in access control models due to many reasons. Conflict resolution in real-time can be a challenging task due to the complexity of the access control rules. For a large number of access rules for a given service, detecting exactly which rules caused conflicts can be a daunting task. This paper describes an algorithm to resolve conflicts using the ARSL (Authorization Rule Specification Language) model. The algorithm is designed to work on the complexity issues of conflict resolution by preventing the occurrences of conflicts. The algorithm is based on priority of the authorization rules for a given resource and the priority is based on the sequence of occurrences of the authorization rules specified in the ARSL input file.