Secondary and Approximate Authorization Model (SAAM) and its Application to Bell-LaPadula Policies

The talk defines the secondary and approximate authorization model (SAAM). In SAAM, approximate authorization responses are inferred from cached primary responses, and therefore provide an alternative source of access control decisions in the event that the authorization server is unavailable or slow. The ability to compute approximate authorizations improves the reliability and performance of access control sub-systems and ultimately the application systems themselves. The operation of a system that employs SAAM depends on the type of access control policy it implements. We propose and analyze algorithms for computing secondary authorizations in the case of policies based on the Bell-LaPadula model. In this context, we define a dominance graph, and describe its construction and usage for generating secondary responses to authorization requests. Preliminary results of evaluating SAAM-BLP algorithms demonstrate a 15% increase in the number of authorization requests that can be served without consulting access control policies.