Detecting Conflicts in ABAC Policies with Rule-Reduction and Binary-Search Techniques

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) policies are effective and flexible in governing the access to information and resources in open distributed computing environments. However, ABAC policy rules are often complex making them prone to conflicts. This paper proposes an optimized method to detect the conflicts between statistically conflicting rules in an ABAC policy. This method includes two optimization techniques: rule reduction and binary-search. The first technique reduces the rules into a set of compact, semantically equivalent rules through removing redundant information among the rules. The binary-search technique is then applied to discover the conflicts among them.