On Automated Role-Based Access Control Assessment in Enterprise Systems

Software system security gets a lot of attention from the industry for its crucial role in protecting private resources. Typically, users access a system’s services via an application programming interface (API). This API must be protected to prevent unauthorized access. One way that developers deal with this challenge is by using role-based access control where each entry point is associated with a set of user roles. However, entry points may use the same methods from lower layers in the application with inconsistent permissions. Currently, developers use integration or penetration testing which demands a lot of effort to test authorization inconsistencies. This paper proposes an automated method to test role-based access control in enterprise applications. Our method verifies inconsistencies within the application using authorization role definitions that are associated with the API entry points. By analyzing the method calls and entity accesses on subsequent layers, inconsistencies across the entire application can be extracted. We demonstrate our solution in a case study and discuss our preliminary results.