Recent advances in access control

Access control is the process of mediating every request to resources and data maintained by a system and determining whether the request should be granted or denied. Traditional access control models and languages result limiting for emerging scenarios, whose open and dynamic nature requires the development of new ways of enforcing access control. Access control is then evolving with the complex open environments that it supports, where the decision to grant an access may depend on the properties (attributes) of the requestor rather than her dentity and where the access control restrictions to be enforced may come from different authorities. These issues pose several new challenges to the design and implementation of access control systems. In this chapter, we present the emerging trends in the access control field to address the new needs and desiderata of today’s systems.