A UML extension for modeling break-glass policies

Abstract

In emergency situations, certain subjects sometimes have to perform important tasks although they are usually not authorized to perform these tasks. Break-glass policies have been introduced as a sophisticated exception handling mechanism to resolve such situations. They enable selected subjects to break or override the standard access control policies of an information system in a controlled manner. However, modeling support for break-glass policies is largely missing. In this paper, we present an approach to provide modeling support for break-glass policies in the context of process-related RBAC models. In particular, we provide a UML2 extension that allows for the integrated modeling of processes and break-glass policies. Additional constraints are formally specified via OCL. We also implemented our approach as an extension to the BusinessActivity library and runtime engine. The source code of our implementation is available for download.