In this session, Graham Williamson of KuppingerCole will present on the current state of the Dynamic Authorization Management market based on the brand-new KuppingerCole Leadership Compass document on the subject. The session will discuss the direction of IAM solutions to externalise their authentication and authorisation decisions to a centrally managed decision point. The presentation will advise on the direction various vendors have taken and the degree to which standards such as XACML are supported. Graham will also advise on expectations for the future development of this market sector and the core requirements when selecting a product in this area. The presentation will position Dynamic Authorization Management in the context of a comprehensive IAM solution.
There is an ongoing discussion about terms such as RBAC (Role Based Access Control) and ABAC (Attribute Based Access Control). However, is it really about either-or? Or isn’t it that most role concepts take other attributes such as the Organizational Unit into account, while the role is a major attribute for most ABAC concepts? Shouldn’t the discussion be more about the question on how to make the shift from Static Access Management, based on pre-determined ACLs (Access Control Lists) etc., towards Dynamic Access Management and especially Dynamic Authorization Management, where applications ask at runtime for authorization decisions? But how to make that shift, how to convince application architects and developers? The panelists will talk about both RBAC and ABAC and how to make Dynamic Authorization Management a success, based on their experience.
OpenRBAC is an open source implementation of the ANSI standard RBAC. It uses OpenLDAP as backend for storing information on user, roles, resources, priviledges, etc. This has a number of advantages and only very few limitations. Access decisions can be retrieved by simple ldap searches so that a OpenRBAC based Policy Decison Point can answer ten thousands of such queries per seconds. Since two other RBAC software products use LDAP, currently work is being done on an IETF Internet Draft to standardize the LDAP schema and a specific LDAP extended operation for interoparable implementations. The talk will introduce
RBAC, OpenRBAC and report on the LDAP standardisation work.