Observing access control policies using scrabble games

Access control is concerned with the policies that manage data sharing activities. Access control plays a crucial role in application areas such as education, health and business. However, most programming languages and programming environments do not naturally provide support for implementing access control policies requiring access control policies for systems to be coded as part of the development effort. Access control management policies are high-level features so having to involve a computer programmer during deployment stages for making changes to policies is costly. In this paper, we present an abstraction of access control management policies in the form of extended scrabble in its rules. The needs of access control policies program construct for supporting this game are examined. New relevant program constructs are then incorporated into JACIE (Java-based Authoring language for Collaborative Interactive Environments). The usefulness of these program construct are being demonstrated through the extended scrabble.