Integrating Self Sovereign Identity in XACML: the MERGE Approach
Andrea De Salve, Damiano Di Francesco Maesa, Paolo Mori, Giulio Piva, Laura Ricci · 2024
Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) systems are commonly used for protecting resources from unauthorized accesses. They perform the access decision process taking into account a set of attributes describing the features of the subjects executing the accesses, the resources being accessed, and the environment. In this paper, we propose to enhance traditional ABAC systems by integrating them with the novel Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) paradigm. More precisely, we propose a novel access control framework, leveraging the well known eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) standard for ABAC systems, which allows to exploit SSI credentials as sources of users’ attributes for policy evaluation. Finally, we showcase a prototype implementation of our proposal, and we analyze its performance when evaluating XACML policies integrating SSI credentials with a variable number of attributes.