A role based access control system for electronic education

Abstract

Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is an advanced and promising access control technology. RBAC associates users with roles, roles with permissions, and a user accesses a permission only when the user has an authorized role which is associated with that permission.

The thesis is a study of the NIST RBAC standard, and a demonstration of RBAC's application in e-education system. It gives a requirement analysis and specification for e-education system, and designs a hybrid RBAC model. This study also introduces two unique features: one is to create a privacy attribute and associate it with each permission; the other one is to have three levels of administrative functions. It is proved that these novel techniques not only reduce the number of conflict roles but also improve security and enforce privacy.