Dan Gradl [
http://community.jboss.org/people/dgradl] created the discussion
"XACML Enforcement"
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http://community.jboss.org/message/639028#639028
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This is a post in a serious of discussions I am starting to get some discussion going on
XACML. I led the implementation of XACML on a large scale using the original SunXACML
libraries as the PDP and I am sharing some of my insights as a way to elicit some
requirements on the further development of XACML. The original post and index to these
discussions is
http://community.jboss.org/thread/175091?tstart=0
http://community.jboss.org/thread/175091?tstart=0.
This thread will discuss policy enforcement. The core JBoss XACML (PicketBox) portion
provides PDP, context handling, and a bit of PIP functionality. Any PEP capability is
elsewhere.
Anil, you mentioned in another thread that PEPs are in higher level projects. When you
get a chance can you let me know where to look for those?
Enforcement can be very specific to the resource being protected and to the security
environment, but I think there could be some useful pieces that could be provided out of
the box. The first thing is simply an API to simplify making a XACML request. The
majority of enforcement types will only need to deal with a small number of core
attributes.. e.g. subject-id, resource-id, action-id. Additional attributes could be
made available more simply as key/value pairs rather than requiring the PEP implementer to
construct a complex XACML Request object.
The second thing that can be provided is a library of PEPs that can handle common
resources, in this case container resources or development framework resources. For
example, you might be able to provide a generalized PEP for an EJB, a servlet, a portlet,
etc. You might have resources in Seam (I'm not very familiar with Seam, so forgive
me) but maybe some REST resource or JSF resources (perhaps you want to protect a data
field).
Last thing might be to provide common obligation handling capabilities... maybe must log
or something like this. Plus, the XACML spec states that if a PEP cannot fulfil an
obligation it should deny access....if every PEP is written differently, its hard to
consistently ensure this is met.
In all, its hard to provide a set of PEPs that will work for all resources you are
protecting, and there's not a ton you can provide here.. but just a couple
thoughts/ideas.
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