Attention Rate of Attribute Items: On the Combination of ABAC Rules

In order to deal with the conflicts between two Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) rules, a method for combining rules from different policies is proposed in this paper. By the definitions of attention rate of attribute items, which reveals the inherence of an access control rule/policy while the attention rate of attribute items of a policy can be obtained from those of the rules, and priority rate of an access request, which reflects the security goal of the system, the concepts of a-applicable rule and a-applicable policy are defined and the conflicts between rules are divided into two categories: irrelevant rules conflict and relevant rules conflict. Finally, methods for eliminating both of the two types of conflicts are introduced.