International Business Machines Corporation

Drew Thomas Walters

Saurabh Desai

Niteesh Kumar Dubey

Ravi Shankar

Murali Vaddagiri

Xinya Wang

Yantian Tom Lu

Ravl A Shankar

A method, apparatus, and computer usable program product for automatic activation of roles is provided. When a user initiates an action, a set of roles needed for the action is identified. A set of roles assigned to the user is also identified. From the two sets of roles, all roles that are common to both sets are identified in a subset of roles. Roles in this subset are assigned to the user and are sufficient for the action. One or more roles from this subset of roles is selected for activation depending on system policies in effect. Selected roles are automatically activated without requiring any intervention from the user. Once the selected roles are activated, they can become inactive upon completion of the current action, or remain active for subsequent actions by the user during all or part of a user session. System policies can decide how the roles are selected for activation, and the duration of which the roles remain active once activated.

Automatic role activation

A computer implemented method, apparatus, and computer program product for access control in a mixed discretionary access control and role based access control environment. In one embodiment, an execution access for a command is determined using a set of role based authorizations for a user invoking the command. In response to a determination that the user invoking the command is authorized based on the set of role based authorizations, a privilege in a set of privileges associated with the command is raised. Raising the privilege in the set of privileges bypasses discretionary access control checks. In response to a determination that the user invoking the command is unauthorized based on the set of role based authorizations, an execution access for the command is determined using a set of discretionary access mode bits associated with the command.

Determination of access checks in a mixed role based access control and discretionary access control environment

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Austin, TX, United States of America

Drew Thomas Walters