RoleVAT: Visual Assessment of Practical Need for Role Based Access Control

Role based access control (RBAC) is a powerful security administration concept that can simplify permission assignment management. Migration to and maintenance of RBAC requires role engineering, the identification of a set of roles that offer administrative benefit. However, establishing that RBAC is desirable in a given enterprise is lacking in current role engineering processes. To help identify the practical need for RBAC, we propose RoleVAT, a Role engineering tool for the Visual Assessment of user and permission Tendencies. User and permission clusters can be visually identified as potential user groups or roles. The benefit and impact of this visual analysis in enterprise environments is discussed and demonstrated through testing on real life as well as synthetic datasets. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of RoleVAT as well as interesting user and role tendencies in real enterprise environments.