Identity and Access Management, Java, XACML Bites

XACML 1.1 Class Diagram

I’ve been recently working on an interesting little project: converting XACML 1.1 policy (sets) to XACML 3.0 policies in order to help migrate a customer from a legacy environment to Axiomatics.

In order to proceed with the conversion, I decided to use stock tools available off-the-shelf and custom code as little as possible. Since I write in Java, I chose to go for JAX-B especially since the support for JAXB has become better and better over the years. XJC itself is part of the JDK and it makes generating Java classes from XML schemas a breeze.

I’ll talk some more about that in a separate post. In the meantime though, I wanted to share with you an old picture, the class diagram for XACML 1.1. I extracted it from the core specification documentation which can be found here.

XACML 1.1 Policy Language UML Class Diagram
This UML class diagram shows the elements of the XACML 1.1 policy language

In this class diagram, the structural elements of XACML are clearly shown:

  • PolicySet
  • Policy
  • Rule

I’ll keep you updated on the conversion progress. Check out my github repository as well.