Access control models in heterogeneous information systems: From conception to exploitation

The development of the information systems should answer more and more to the problems of federated data sources and the problems with the heterogeneous distributed information systems. The assurance of data access security realized in the cooperative information systems with loose connection among local data sources is hard to achieve mainly for two reasons: the local data sources are heterogeneous (i.e. data, models, access security models, semantics, etc.) and the local autonomy of systems does not allow to create a global integrated security schema. The paper proposes to use one common set of access control concepts to support the access control management in security of heterogeneous information systems. The UML (Unified Modelling Language) concepts can be used to define and implement the most popular access control models, such as DAC, MAC or RBAC. Next, the concepts derived from different models can be joined to use one common approach comprehensible for each administrator of each cooperative information system in the federation.