Extending Access Control Models with Break-glass

Achim D. Brucker and Helmut Petritsch

Access control models are usually static, i.e., permissions are granted based on a policy that only changes seldom. Especially for scenarios in health care and disaster management, a more flexible support of access control, i.e., the underlying policy, is needed.

Break-glass is one approach for such a flexible support of policies which helps to prevent system stagnation that could harm lives or otherwise result in losses. Today, break-glass techniques are usually added on top of standard access control solutions in an ad-hoc manner and, therefore, lack an integration into the underlying access control paradigm and the systems' access control enforcement architecture.

We present an approach for integrating, in a fine-grained manner, break-glass strategies into standard access control models and their accompanying enforcement architecture. This integration provides means for specifying break-glass policies precisely and supporting model-driven development techniques based on such policies.

Keywords: disaster management, access-control, break-glass, model-driven security
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Please cite this article as follows:
Achim D. Brucker and Helmut Petritsch. Extending Access Control Models with Break-glass. In ACM symposium on access control models and technologies (SACMAT), pages 197-206, ACM Press, 2009.
Keywords: disaster management, access-control, break-glass, model-driven security
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