Distributed Horizontal Access Control System Using Frida

Abstract

The hierarchical model for access control allows for us to organize users in a way that for mimics the social groupings we see in society like corporations. Having hierarchical access control schemes provides benefits including easy-to-understand structure that mimics companies, quicker action by consolidating control to an increasing smaller set of individuals and allows for graduality in the permissions given to users. However, this structure has flaws where we must always have someone who owns and assigns all privileges and can be ill-fitting for other forms of social structures which are not hierarchical like unions. To address this, we implement an access control scheme which referred to as a horizontal access control scheme which allows for a democratic action when managing access control over a shared data object. This access control scheme gives users the ability to vote for how the data object managed and changed. In other words, this is an election-based structure where users are able submit changes to the structure while having other voters submit a preference on whether to accept or reject it. This would remove some of the dangers of having a single place in a hierarchy such as the user who assigns permissions which, if compromised, could fully compromise control over the entire data object. This democratic access control scheme is built on top of another system called Frida to help facilitate this. We implement a horizontal access control scheme to facilitate democratic voting for changing shared data objects without relying on a server to hold the shared structure.