A Model for Usage Control in GRID Systems

The usage control model (UCON) is a new access control paradigm proposed by Park and Sandhu that encompasses and extends several existing models. Its main novelty, in addition to the unifying view, is based on continuity of usage monitoring and mutability of attributes of subjects and objects. We identified this model as a perfect candidate for managing access/usage control in GRID systems due to their peculiarities where continuity of control is a central issue. Here we extend and systematize our previous work on usage control to develop a full model for usage control in GRID systems. We use as policy specification language a process description language and show how this is suitable to model the usage policy models of the original UCON model.