XACML Bites Archives - Page 3 of 4 - Harvesting web technologies

Coarse-grained vs. fine-grained access control – part I

A few weeks ago, Baljinder Wadhwa, a consultant at HP, started an interesting thread on coarse-grained vs. fine-grained access control trying to figure out what the differences were between the two. His question generated a high level of great answers that went in different directions. This post aims at summarizing those answers, bringing in my own view, and producing a structured answer to Baljinder’s question. Here goes… Vocabulary definition Coarse: (1) composed of relatively large parts or particles <coarse sand> (2) : loose or rough in texture <coarse cloth> Fine: (1) very thin in gauge or texture (2) : not coarse <fine sand> (3) : very small (4) : keen <a knife with a fine edge> (5) : very precise […]

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Identity and Access Management, XACML Bites

XACML 3.0 wins award at the European Identity Conference 2011 #EIC11

Cybersecurity award goes to XACML European Identity Conference 2011, Munich. Today was a great day at EIC 2011 where Axiomatics is currently demoing its fine-grained authorization capabilities based on the latest version of the XACML standard, XACML 3.0.It ended with the usual ceremony awards where Tim Cole et al. handed out awards to various projects in the identity space (cloud security, IAM, entitlements management).A special award was handed to the XACML Technical Committee for its outstanding work on the latest version of XACML, XACML 3.0. Hal Lockart of Oracle and co-chair of the TC stepped up to accept the award and thanked the entire TC for a great group effort. He also thanked the editor of the XACML 3.0 specification, […]

Identity and Access Management

When OpenID meets XACML: externalize authentication and authorization from your business apps

Background About a year ago, a few months into my new job at Axiomatics, I pulled together a web-based app using J2EE (JSF, servlets, POJOs) and Icefaces (AJAXfied JSF) to illustrate fine-grained access control for web applications and portals. To secure the application, I used Tomcat’s authentication mechanism (its implementation of the HTTP FORM-based authentication protocol) and Axiomatics‘s off-the-shelf Authorization filter for servlets. What I then got – at zero development effort – was a sturdy, secure, finely-grained controlled web app where users could access certain pages and/or parts of pages based on the set of attributes a given user had potentially combined with attributes of the targeted resource (the page, the portlet, the individual GUI element of the page…), […]

XACML Bites

XACML 102 – Pimp my XACML – Part II: with XSLT

In my previous post on making XACML look pretty, we had a look at a very simple and easy way to add some colors / borders / general style to the XML via CSS. The CSS was interpreted by your browser and the result displayed there. CSS is simple and straightforward but it is also limited (not to mention it is probably not the most adequate tool for our purpose). The next level up is to use XSLT (part of the W3C XSL group of standards). At our level, in a very reductive and simple way, the key difference between CSS and XSLT is that CSS doesn’t touch the XML source. It merely adds style. XSLT, on the other hand, […]

XACML Bites

XACML 102 – Pimp my XACML – Part I: with CSS

Have you recently looked at the XACML 2.0 schema? Or perhaps the newborn, XACML 3.0? Well as far as babies go, it ain’t the cutest. Sure, it’s not XACML’s fault. It’s just that XML and in particular schemas have never really been that friendly to read. But don’t worry, we can help. When it comes to cosmetic surgery, there are quite a few ways to enhance XML representation. Read on to learn how to visualize XACML with CSS. There are two ways – grossly speaking – to make XML more user-friendly: These techniques are by no means specific to XACML. You could apply them to any XML language e.g. WS-Policy, SAML, etc… Let’s have a look at a sample XACML […]