Temporal Authorization Graphs: Pros, Cons and Limits

Abstract

As more private data is entering the web, defining authorization about its access is crucial for privacy protection. This paper proposes a policy language that leverages SPARQL expressiveness and popularity for flexible access control management and enforces the protection using temporal graphs. The temporal graphs are created during the authentication phase and are cached for further usage. They enable design-time policy testing and debugging, which is necessary for correctness guarantee. The security never comes with convenience, and this paper examines the environments in which the temporal graphs are suitable. Based on the evaluation results, an approximated function is defined for suitability determination based on the expected temporal graph size.