implementing a trust-based access control system the feasi-
bility of realizing pro-active access control. In Section 6,we
perform some experiment to show the effectiveness of PAC on
constraining the behavior of subjects in pro-active access
control. Finally, in Section 7, we conclude this paper in which
we also discuss our future research.
2. Related work
A great deal of work has been done in the past few years on
access control models and mechanisms to deal with the more
complex issue of data protection in open systems and net-
works, among which trust has emerged as an effective tool.
Under the general framework of trust and trust management,
trust-based access control (TrusBAC) was proposed as an
enhancement to RBAC (Chakraborty and Ray, 2006) with the
main idea that evaluation based on the identity, behavior
history and some other factors that are related to a subject can
be performed and the evaluation value can then be used to
determine the role of the subject. Consequently, as the eval-
uation value changes, so does the role of the subject, hence
the corresponding access permissions. Sandhu and Zhang
proposed architecture of trust management based on roles
that combines RBAC with trust management to build an ac-
cess control system based on certificates (Sandhu and Zhang,
2005). Li proposed a dynamic trust model that is related to the
context of the system in distributed environment (Li et al.,
2008). Guo proposed a method that can combine trust and
RBAC to solve the issue of unknown users (Guo et al., 2005).
Tian proposed a dynamic role access control model based on
the idea of establishing trust based on the behavior of users
(Tian et al., 2008). He applied the Game Theory to analyzing a
proposed trust-based access control in which trust values are
computed based on multiple factors (He et al., 2013).
A close examination of the above models and methods
reveals that they are still essentially identity based access
control models since access control decisions are made based
on the identities of subjects. Although trust has been intro-
duced into these models, it is used primarily to determine the
roles and thus the permissions that a subject can assume. Nor
has there been any attempt to formally analyze how trust
would systematically affect access control decisions.
Game Theory is a field of applied mathematics that is used
to describe and analyze interactive situations in order to make
decisions (Fudenberg and Tirole, 1991). It provides an analyt-
ical tool to predict the outcome of a complex interaction
among rational entities in which rationality demands strict
adherence to a strategy based on perceived or measured re-
sults. Game Theory has found many applications in the areas
of economics, political science, biology and sociology. It has
been applied to solving problems in engineering and com-
puter science since early 1990s (Anderson and Moore, 2006).
In the Game Theory, decision-making among multiple
players is viewed as a game in which each player would
choose the game strategies that can bring the best possible
results to the player while anticipating the rational actions
from other players (Osborne and Rubinstein, 1994). Game is a
precise description of strategic interactions that include the
constraints of, and the payoffs for, the actions that the players
can take, but not necessarily the actions that they will actually
take (Roy et al., 2010). According to the Game Theory, a game
consists of the following four basic elements (Osborne, 2004):
(1) Player: a basic entity in a game that assumes the task of
making choices for actions. A player can be a person, a
machine or a group of persons within a game. In access
control, subjects and objects are the players.
(2) Strategy: a plan of actions within the game that a player
can take during the play of a game. In access control,
subjects issue access requests and access control makes
decisions on behalf of objects following a strategy.
(3) Order: the sequence of steps in a strategy chosen by the
players. In access control, a subject issues an access
request first. After receiving the access request, access
control makes a decision on whether to authorize the
request. After each access, access control may also
perform some analysis on the access to prepare itself
for dealing with future access requests.
(4) Payoff: the positive or negative rewards to a player for
taking a given action within the game. In access control,
the payoff for a subject is the set of access permissions
as it implies the amount of information and resources
that the subject can obtain while that for access control
is to allow maximal use of information and resources
with minimal security risks based on access control
rules or policies.
In the Game Theory, Nash equilibrium describes the con-
ditions for a stable state of a game in which no player would
unilaterally change its strategy as doing so would lower its
own payoffs provided that all other players would adhere to
the prescribed strategy (Nash, 1950). The set of strategies that
leads to Nash equilibrium should then be chosen by the
players in order to maximize their individual payoffs. Access
control can be modeled as a two-player game, i.e., between
the subjects and the objects (or the access control on behalf of
the objects). Thus, Nash equilibrium provides the conditions
in which the subject as a player has nothing to gain by
changing its strategy unilaterally and can guide the design of
an access control model to curb malicious access by subjects.
The basic principle is that if a player, e.g., the objects, has
chosen a strategy and the other player, e.g., a subject, cannot
benefit from changing its strategy with the first player's choice
unchanged, then the set of choices and the corresponding
payoffs constitute the Nash equilibrium (Charilas and
Panagopoulos, 2010).
Game Theory has been widely applied to many aspects of
network interactions, but there has not been much in-depth
study on applications to access control. There are so far only
a few attempts in which the Game Theory has been applied to
access control to make authorization decisions based on
analysis of potential payoffs that objects can get by providing
the requested access. Zhang proposed a game-theory based
access control method for social networks (Zhang et al., 2011)
in which the Game Theory is used to evaluate the payoffs as
the basis of authorizing access requests from peers. Tian and
Lin proposed a game-theoretic control mechanism for user
behavior in trustworthy networks (Tian and Lin, 2007)in
which a mechanism is proposed based on Bayesian network
computers & security 49 (2015) 132e 146134