GenericBreakGlass: XACML Reference Implementation

Today’s IT systems implement fine-grained access control mechanisms to protect a companies assets and to fulfill regulations such as Basel III, SoX, or HIPAA. In general, access control cannot fully capture all requirements. In particular, for exceptional situations it is hard to formulate access control policies taking all possible legitimate accesses into account. Exceptional Access Control is an approach for allowing users to override access control decisions in, e.g., emergency situations. Different approaches and techniques have been presented how to allow the user to override access control restrictions in a controlled way, e.g., Break (the) Glass. Break Glass Access Control allows users to override access control decision in a controlled manner.

This project contains an XACML PDP/PEP infrastructure supporting Break Glass Access Control.

Team

Main developers:

• Achim D. Brucker
• Helmut Petritsch

License

This project is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0.

SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0

Master Repository

The master git repository for this project is hosted by the Software Assurance & Security Research Team at https://git.logicalhacking.com/GenericBreakGlass/GenericBreakGlass-XACML.

Publications

The most important publications are:

• Achim D. Brucker and Helmut Petritsch. Extending access control models with break-glass. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM symposium on Access control models and technologies (SACMAT ‘09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 197-206. 2009. doi: 10.1145/1542207.1542239
• Helmut Petritsch: Break-Glass - Handling Exceptional Situations in Access Control. Springer 2014, ISBN 978-3-658-07364-0, pp. 1-220 doi: 10.1007/978-3-658-07365-7