Access Control: The Neglected Frontier

Access control is an indispensable security technology. However, it has been relatively neglected by the research community. Over the past ten years, the doctrine of mandatory and discretionary access controls has slowly become discredited but no dominant doctrine has emerged to replace it. There are promising candidates such as role and task-based access controls but these are still in their formative stages and have not gained wide acceptance. This paper gives my personal perspective on these issues and identifies some of the important access control issues that researchers and practitioners should focus on.

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