An Efficient Authorization Mechanism for Secure XML Sources on the Web

Abstract

XML-based access control technology aims at providing an authorization policy that can be consistently applied to various products for access control services on Internet and different kinds of environment for the products and thus providing interoperability to the existing access control products with diverse kinds of environment and types. The existing access control fails to consider information structure and semantics sufficiently due to the fundamental limitations of HTML. In addition, XML document access control supplies only action read and permits alterations of very limited value for action write. The existing access control has disadvantages that DOM tree should be loaded on memory while all XML documents are parsed to generate DOM tree; that a lot of memory is used in repetitive search for tree to authorize access to all nodes in DOM tree; and that the complex authorization evaluation process may lower system performance. In this paper, we present an authorization mechanism for secure XML sources on the Web.