In computer systems security Role-Based Access Control is an approach to restricting system access to authorized users. It is a newer and alternative approach to discretionary access control and mandatory access control.

Within an organisation, roles are created for various job functions. The permission to perform certain operations ('permissions') are assigned to specific roles. Members of staff (or other system users) are assigned particular roles, and through those role assignments aquire the permissions to perform particular system functions.

Since users are not assigned permissions directly, but only aquire them through their role (or roles), management of individual user rights becomes a matter of simply assigning the appropriate roles to the user, which simplifies common operations such as adding a user, or changing a user's department.

RBAC differs from access control lists (ACL's) used in traditional discretionary access control systems in that it assigns permissions to specific operations with meaning in the organization, rather than to low level data objects. For example, an access control list could be used to grant or deny write access to a particular system file, but it would not say in what ways that file could be changed. In an RBAC based system an operation might be to create a 'credit account' transaction in a financial application or to populate a 'blood sugar level test' record in a medical application. The assignment of permission to perform a particular operation is meaningful, because the operations are fine grained and themselves have meaning within the application.

With the concepts of role hierarchy and constraints, one can control RBAC to create or simulate Lattice-Based Access Control LBAC. Thus RBAC can be considered a superset of LBAC.

When defining an RBAC model, the following conventions are useful:

• U = User = A person or automated agent .
• R = Role = Job function / Title which defines an authority level.
• P = Permissions = An approval of a mode of access to a resource.
• S = Session = A mapping involving U,R and / P
• UA = User Assignment.
• PA = Permission Assignment
• RH = Partially ordered role Hierarchy. RH can also be written: >
• A user can have multiple roles.
• A role can have multiple users.
• A role can have many permissions.
• A permission can be assigned to many roles.

A Constraint places a restrictive rule on the potential inheritance of permissions from opposing roles. For example the same person should not be allowed to both create a log-in account for someone, and also be allowed to authorise the procedure.

Thus, using set theory notation:

• PA is a subset of or is equal to P x R and is a many to many permission to role assignment relation.
• UA is a subset of or is equal to U x R and is a many to many user to role assignment relation.
• RH is a subset of or is equal to R x R

The notation: x > y means that x inherits the permissions of y.

A user may have multiple simultaneous sessions with different permissions.

See also

• LBAC Lattice-Based Access Control (Equivalent to Mandatory Access Control (MAC)).
• Security labels
• Security classification
• Tranquility
• Covert channel
• Chinese wall
• Authentication
• Blind credential

External links

• Role Based Access Controls at NIST (http://csrc.nist.gov/rbac/) - huge US government website with lots of information on the theory and implementation of RBAC