Attribute-Based Access Control

Why Trust Techopedia

What Does Attribute-Based Access Control Mean?

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) is a different approach to access control in which access rights are granted through the use of policies made up of attributes working together. ABAC uses attributes as the building blocks to define access control rules and access requests. This is done through a structured language called the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML), which is as easy to read or write as a natural language.

Advertisements

Techopedia Explains Attribute-Based Access Control

In an attribute-based access control system, any type of attribute such as user attributes and resource attributes are used to determine access. These attributes are compared to defined static values or even to other attributes, which turns it into a relation-based access control. Attributes come in key-value pairs such as "Role=Supervisor," which can be used to limit access to a certain feature of a system. In this case only users with the designation of supervisor or higher can be given access to that feature or system.

In an ABAC system, rules are written using XACML. For example, a rule could state:

"Permit managers to access financial data provided they are from finance department."

This would allow users with attributes of Role=Manager and Department=Finance to access data with the attributes of Category=Financial. This leaves other types of users from even getting to the login screen and preventing certain types of attacks like brute force and library attacks.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.