Implementing Role Based Access Controls Using X.509 Attribute Certificates

This paper describes a policy driven role based access control system. The user's

roles, and the policy are stored in X509 Attribute Certificates. The policy, written in XML, describes who is trusted to allocate roles to users, and what permissions each role has. The DTD has been published at XML.org. Access control decisions are made by an Access Control Decision Function consisting of just three Java methods and a constructor. The decision is made according to the requested mode of access, the user’s trusted roles and the policy. A tool making and storing ACs is also described.