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To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2010.03.004 Byline: Jaime A. Pavlich-Mariscal (a), Steven A. Demurjian (b), Laurent D. Michel (b) Abstract: Modeling of access control policies, along with their implementation in code, must be an integral part of the software development process, to ensure that the proper level of security in an application is attained. Previous work of the authors in this area yielded a framework that incorporates access control at the design and code levels, through a set of new extensions to UML and a set of approaches to enfoce access control in an application (). An essential property of the code that has not been addressed by that framework is security assurance, which, in the context of this research, is to insure that the application code behaves consistently with the access control policy. This paper proposes a security assurance mechanism that formalizes the application behavior using labeled transition systems and structural operational semantics (). Simulation relations () are used to demonstrate the correctness of the access control code with respect to the design. To validate the approach, this paper proves correctness of two access control enforcement mechanisms that are part of our case study: a basic approach to implement access control in code and an aspect-oriented approach. Author Affiliation: (a) Departamento de Ingenieria de Sistemas y Computacion, Universidad Catolica del Norte, Angamos 0610. Antofagasta, Chile (b) Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of Connecticut, Unit-2155, 371 Fairfield Road, Storrs, CT 06269-2155, USA Article History: Received 26 January 2010; Revised 3 March 2010; Accepted 26 March 2010

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2009.11.005 Byline: Jaime A. Pavlich-Mariscal (a), Steven A. Demurjian (b), Laurent D. Michel (b) Abstract: Modeling of security policies, along with their realization in code, must be an integral part of the software development process, to achieve an acceptable level of security for a software application. Among all of the security concerns (e.g. authentication, auditing, access control, confidentiality, etc.), this paper addresses the incorporation of access control into software. The approach is to separate access control concerns from the rest of the design. To assist designers to visualize access control policies separated from non-security concerns, this paper proposes a set of access control diagrams, i.e., extensions to the UML to represent three main access control models: role-based access control (RBAC), mandatory access control (MAC), and discretionary access control (DAC). To better adapt to changing requirements, and assist designers to customize access control policies, this paper proposes a set of access control features, i.e., small components that realize specific capabilities of access control models. Designers can select the features they require, and compose them to yield different access control policies. When transitioning into code, the main focus is to preserve separation of access control concerns. This paper describes an approach to realize access control diagrams and features in code through structure-preserving mappings, describes three different approaches to enforce access control in code, and evaluates the way each of them separate access control from other concerns. Author Affiliation: (a) Departamento de Ing. de Sistemas y Computacion, Universidad Catolica del Norte, Angamos 0610, Antofagasta, Chile (b) Department of Computer Science & Engineering, The University of Connecticut, Unit-2155, 371 Fairfield Road, Storrs, CT 06269-2155, USA Article History: Received 6 October 2008; Revised 29 October 2009; Accepted 10 November 2009