How to Declare Access Control Policies for XML Structured Information Objects using OASIS’ eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML)

Web Services, as the new building blocks of today’s Internet provide the power to access distributed and heterogeneous information objects, which is the base for more advanced use like in electronic commerce. But, the access to these information objects is not always unrestricted. The owner of the information objects may control access due to different reasons. This paper introduces a novel approach for declaring information object related access restrictions, based on a valid XML encoding. The paper shows, how the access restrictions can be declared using XACML and Xpath. Based on the specified ‘fine grained’ policies, multiple policies can be applicable. If these policies declare positive and negative permissions for the same subject, policy inconsistencies exist. The paper also focuses on specifying the ground of policy inconsistencies and how to solve them.