Role Slices: A Notation for RBAC Permission Assignment and Enforcement

During the past decade, there has been an explosion in the complexity of software applications, with an increasing emphasis on software design via model-driven architectures, patterns, and models such as the unified modeling language (UML). Despite this, the integration of security concerns throughout the product life cycle has lagged, resulting in software infrastructures that are untrustworthy in terms of their ability to authenticate users and to limit them to their authorized application privileges. To address this issue, we present an approach to integrate role-based access control (RBAC) into UML at design-time for permission assignment and enforcement. Specifically, we introduce a new UML artifact, the role slice, supported via a new UML role-slice diagram, to capture RBAC privileges at design time within UML. Once captured, we demonstrate the utilization of aspect-oriented programming (AOP) techniques for the automatic generation of security enforcement code. Overall, we believe that our approach is an important step to upgrading security to be an indispensable part of the software process.