Secure interoperation in a multidomain environment employing RBAC policies Basit Shafiq, James Joshi, Elisa Bertino, and Arif Ghafoor   View Paper (PDF)   Return to November 2005, Volume 17, Issue 11 Abstract Multidomain application environments where distributed multiple organizations interoperate with each other are becoming a reality as witnessed by emerging Internet-based enterprise applications. Composition of a global coherent security policy that governs information and resource accesses in such environments is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a policy integration framework for merging heterogeneous role-based access control (RBAC) policies of multiple domains into a global access control policy. A key challenge in composition of this policy is the resolution of conflicts that may arise among the RBAC policies of individual domains. We propose an integer programming (IP)-based approach for optimal resolution of such conflicts. The optimality criterion is to maximize interdomain role accesses without exceeding the autonomy losses beyond the acceptable limit. ©2006 Association for Computing Machinery