An Extended ACL for Solving Authorization Conflicts

Authorization is an important means to endow the access requestors with different access rights according to their identities. In trust management and access control systems, authorization is used to ensure that legitimate users can access the required resources or accomplish the valid operations towards some resources. However, unlimited authorization transfer may lead to conflicts in access right. Explicit conflict and implicit conflict are two typical conflicts. When authorization conflicts happen, the access control system may involve in chaotic states and cannot provide natural services for the users. To figure out such a problem, a new approach for solving authorization conflicts is proposed. In the approach, an extended ACL is presented to carry the authorization information, and the authorization can be easily implemented by some simple functions. Thereto, a use case is given to show how the approach works, which illustrates that the approach is sound and reasonable.