An access control model for multi-level security in multi-domain networking environments

Access control is important to protect the network security. The increasing demand for secure interactions between network domains brings in new challenges to access control technologies. In this paper we design an access control model which provides a multilevel mapping method between hierarchical access control structures for achieving multilevel security protection in multi-domain networking environments. Hierarchical access control structures ensure rigorous multilevel security in intra domains. And the mapping method based on quantized subject attributes is proposed to determine the subject's security level in its target domain. Credibility is used in the model to adjust the mapping value in order to achieve flexible multilevel inter-domain access control. Experimental results we obtained from simulations are also reported in this paper to verify the effectiveness of the proposed access control model.