Dissertationen zum Thema „Access control“

Role based access control (RBAC) is widely used in health care systems today. Some of the biggest systems in use at Norwegian hospitals utilizes role based integration. The basic concept of RBAC is that users are assigned to roles, permissions are assigned to roles and users acquire permissions by being members of roles. An alternative approach to the role based access distribution, is that information should be available only to those who are taking active part in a patient’s treatment. This approach is called decision based access control (DBAC). While some RBAC implementations grant access to a groups of people by ward, DBAC ensures that access to relevant parts of the patient’s medical record is given for treatment purposes regardless of which department the health care worker belongs to. Until now the granularity which the legal framework describes has been difficult to follow. The practical approach has been to grant access to entire wards or organizational units in which the patient currently resides. Due to the protection of personal privacy, it is not acceptable that any medical record is available to every clinician at all times. The most important reason to implement DBAC where RBAC exists today, is to get an access control model that is more dynamic. The users should have the access they need to perform their job at all times, but not more access than needed. With RBAC, practice has shown that it is very hard to make dynamic access rules when properties such as time and tasks of an employee’s work change. This study reveals that pretty much all security measures in the RBAC systems can be overridden by the use of emergency access features. These features are used extensively in everyday work at the hospitals, and thereby creates a security risk. At the same time conformance with the legal framework is not maintained. Two scenarios are simulated in a fictional RBAC and DBAC environment in this report. The results of the simulation show that a complete audit of the logs containing access right enhancements in the RBAC environment is unfeasible at a large hospital, and even checking a few percent of the entries is also a very large job. Changing from RBAC to DBAC would probably affect this situation to the better. Some economical advantages are also pointed out. If a change is made, a considerable amount of time that is used by health care workers to unblock access to information they need in their everyday work will be saved.

The health and social care sector has a continuous growth in the use of information technology. With more and more information about the patient stored in different systems by different health care actors, information sharing is a key to better treatment. The introduction of the personal health record aims at making this treatment process easier. In addition to being able to share information to others, the patients can also take a more active part in their treatment by communicating with participants through the system. As the personal health record is owned and controlled by the patient with assistance from health care actors, one of the keys to success lies in how the patient can control the access to the record. In this master's thesis we have developed an access control model for the personal health record in a Norwegian setting. The development is based on different studies of existing similar solutions and literature. Some of the topics we present are re-introduced from an earlier project. Interviews with potential users have also been a valuable and important source for ideas and inspiration, especially due to the fact that the access control model sets high demands on user-friendliness. As part of the access control model we have also suggested a set of key roles for the personal health record. Through a conceptual implementation we have further shown that the access control model can be implemented. Three different solutions that show the conceptual implementation in the Indivo personal health record have been suggested, using the Extensible Access Control Markup Language as the foundation.

In the area of computer network security, standardization work has been conducted for several years. However, the sub area of access control and authorization has so far been left out of major standardizing.

This thesis explores the ongoing standardization for access control and authorization. In addition, areas and techniques supporting access control are investigated. Access control in its basic forms is described to point out the building blocks that always have to be considered when an access policy is formulated. For readers previously unfamiliar with network security a number of basic concepts are presented. An overview of access control in public networks introduces new conditions and points out standards related to access control. None of the found standards fulfills all of our requirements at current date. The overview includes a comparison between competing products, which meet most of the stated conditions.

In parallel with this report a prototype was developed. The purpose of the prototype was to depict how access control could be administered and to show the critical steps in formulating an access policy.

This thesis presents a comparative study of four Network Access Control (NAC) technologies; Trusted Network Connect by the Trusted Computing group, Juniper Networks, Inc.’s Unified Access Control, Microsoft Corp.’s Network Access Protection, and Cisco Systems Inc.’s Network Admission Control. NAC is a vision, which utilizes existing solutions and new technologies to provide assurance that any device connecting to a network policy domain is authenticated and is subject to the network’s policy enforcement. Non-compliant devices are isolated until they have been brought back to a complaint status. We compare the NAC technologies in terms of architectural and functional features they provide.

There is a race of NAC solutions in the marketplace, each claiming their own definition and terminology, making it difficult for customers to adopt such a solution, resulting in much uncertainty. The NAC paradigm can be classified into two categories: the first category embraces open standards; the second follows proprietary standards. By selecting these architectures, we cover a representative set of proprietary and open standards-based NAC technologies.

This study concludes that there is a great need for standardization and interoperability of NAC components and that the four major solution proposals that we studied fall short of the desired interoperability. With standards, customers have the choice to adopt solution components from different vendors, selecting, what is commonly referred to as the best of breed. One example for a standard technology that all four NAC technologies that we studied did adopt is the IEEE’s 802.1X port-based access control technology. It is used to control endpoint device access to the network.

One shortcoming that most NAC architectures (with the exception of Trusted Network Connect) have in common, is the lack of a strong root-of-trust. Without it, clients’ compliance measurements cannot be trusted by the policy server whose task is to assess each client’s policy compliance.

This thesis presents a formal role-model based on a combination of approaches towards rolebased access control. This model is used both for access control and information ranking. Purpose: Healthcare information is required by law to be strictly secured. Thus an access control policy is needed, especially when this information is stored in a computer system. Roles, instead of just users, have been used for enforcing access control in computer systems. When a healthcare employee is granted access to information, only the relevant information should be presented by the system, providing better overview and highlighting critical information stored among less important data. The purpose of this thesis is to enable efficiency and quality improvements in healthcare by using IT-solutions that address both access control and information highlighting. Methods: We have developed a formal role model in a previous project. It has been manually tested, and some possible design choices were identified. The project report pointed out that more work was required, in the form of making design choices, implementing a prototype, and extending the model to comply with the Norwegian standard for electronic health records. In preparing this thesis, we reviewed literature about the extensions that we wanted to make to that model. This included deontic logic, delegation and temporal constraints. We made decisions on some of the possible design choices. Some of the topics that were presented in the previous project are also re-introduced in this thesis. The theories are explained through examples, which are later used as a basis for an illustrating scenario. The theory and scenario were used for requirement elicitation for the role-model, and for validating the model. Based on these requirements a formal role-model was developed. To comply with the Norwegian EHR standard the model includes delegation and context based access control. An access control list was also added to allow for patients to limit or deny access to their record information for any individual. To validate the model, we implemented parts of the model in Prolog and tested it with data from the scenario. Results: The test results show rankings for information and controls access to it correctly, thus validating the implemented parts of the model. Other results are a formal model, an executable implementation of parts of the model, recommendations for model design, and the scenario. Conclusions: Using the same role-model for access control and information ranking works, and allows using flexible ways to define policies and information needs.

Large data centers are used for large-scale high-performance tasks that often includes processing and handling sensitive information. It is therefore important to have access control systems that are able to function in large-scale data centers. This thesis looks into existing solutions for the authentication step of access control in large data centers, and analyses how two authentication systems, Kerberos and PKI, will perform when employed on a larger scale, beyond what is normal in a large data center today. The emphasis in the analysis is on possible bottlenecks in the system, computational power spent on access control routines, procedures for administration and key distribution and availability of extension features needed in large scale data center scenarios. Our administration analysis will propose and present possible methods for initial key distribution to new machines in the data center, as well as methods for enrolling new users. We will also propose a method for automatic service instantiation in Kerberos and present a method for service instantiation in PKI. We will look at how the systems handle failed machines in the network, and look at how the systems handle breaches of trusted components. Our performance analysis will show that under given assumptions, both Kerberos and PKI will handle the average load in a hypothetical data center consisting of 100000 machines and 1000 users. We will also see that under an assumed peak load, Kerberos will be able to handle 10000 service requests in under 1 second, whereas the PKI solution would need at least 15 seconds to handle the same number of requests using recommended public key sizes. This means that some programs may need special configurations to work in a PKI system under high load.