GenericBreakGlass: XACML Reference Implementation

Today’s IT systems implement fine-grained access control mechanisms
to protect a companies assets and to fulfill regulations such as
Basel III, SoX, or HIPAA. In general, access control cannot fully
capture all requirements. In particular, for exceptional situations it
is hard to formulate access control policies taking all possible
legitimate accesses into account. Exceptional Access Control is an
approach for allowing users to override access control decisions in,
e.g., emergency situations. Different approaches and techniques
have been presented how to allow the user to override access control
restrictions in a controlled way, e.g., Break (the) Glass. Break
Glass Access Control allows users to override access control decision
in a controlled manner.

This project contains an XACML PDP/PEP infrastructure supporting
Break Glass Access Control.

Team

Main developers:

• Achim D. Brucker
• Helmut Petritsch

License

This project is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0.

SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0

Master Repository

The master git repository for this project is hosted by the Software
Assurance & Security Research Team at
https://git.logicalhacking.com/GenericBreakGlass/GenericBreakGlass-XACML.

Publications

The most important publications are:

• Achim D. Brucker and Helmut Petritsch. Extending access control
  models with break-glass. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM symposium
  on Access control models and technologies (SACMAT '09). ACM, New
  York, NY, USA, 197-206. 2009.
  doi: 10.1145/1542207.1542239
• Helmut Petritsch: Break-Glass - Handling Exceptional Situations in Access Control.
  Springer 2014, ISBN 978-3-658-07364-0, pp. 1-220
  doi: 10.1007/978-3-658-07365-7