A multi-domain role activation model

Organizations establish partnerships in order to achieve a strategic goal. In many cases, resources in a given organization are accessed from external domains, characterizing multi-domain operations. This paper presents an approach to perform role activation in multi-domain environments. The active roles are imported in other domains from a user's home domain. Thus, a Single Role Activation (SRA) is performed, similarly to Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication. The administrative autonomy to define each role permission is kept within each local domain. We evaluated the proposal by implementing a prototype to provide support for SRA, based on RESTful web services and standardized specifications such as XACML and OpenID Connect. The prototype evaluation measured response time for simultaneous access requests, with SRA showing better results when compared to traditional role activation. Furthermore, from a security perspective, the proposal is about 15 times faster than traditional approaches.