UML-based representation of role-based access control

In role-based access control (RBAC) permissions are associated with roles, and users are made members of appropriate roles thereby acquiring the roles´ permissions. The principal motivation behind RBAC is to simplify administration. Several framework for the development of role-based systems have been introduced. However, there are a few works specifying RBAC in a way which system developers or software engineers can easily understand and refer to develop role-based systems. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose visual modeling language in which we can specify, visualize, and document the components of a software system. In this paper we represent the RBAC model with this well-known modeling language to reduce a gap between security models and system developments. We specify the RBAC model with three views: static view, functional view, and dynamic view. In addition, we briefly discuss about the future directions