Enhancing optimistic access controls with usage control

Abstract

With the advent of agile programming, lightweight software processes are being favoured over the highly formalized approaches of the past. Likewise access control may benefit from a less prescriptive approach with an increasing reliance on users to behave ethically. These ideals correlate with optimistic access controls. However ensuring that users behave in a trustworthy manner may require more than optimistic access controls. This paper investigates the possibility of enhancing optimistic access controls with usage control to ensure users conduct themselves in a trustworthy manner. Usage control enables finer-grained control over the usage of digital objects than do traditional access control policies and models. Further to ease the development and maintenance of usage control measures, it is posited that it is completely separated from the application logic by using aspect-oriented programming.