Visual modelling of role-based security policies in distributed multimedia applications

The management of distributed multimedia systems is simplified when it is based on policies. The latter should be platform independent and expressed in terms of roles. Usually, they are defined through languages that conceptualize the hardware characteristics providing powerful abstraction on the technical components of a system. Unluckily, these languages are very difficult to use for nonexpert users. To support all the different types of users visual languages have been proposed. Following this paradigm, we propose a visual language hierarchy and a tool for specifying and implementing access and security policies according to the RBAC model.