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Showing posts from September, 2007

Roles - What 'bout it?

Disclaimer - I have not worked on role-mining project and so most of the views expressed here are based on very limited understanding, a lot of arm chair thinking and some understanding of access management. I may be slightly biased against the role-management because I seem the end goal as Access Management and not role management and so far I have not had the "aha" moment for Role Management. Coming from fine-grained access management background, I have always considered roles as a means to achieve the end goal of access management. Roles to me are an abstraction that we use to separate the policy modeling phase (roles being used to design policy model) and policy management phase (by managing user to role assignment). But a lot of people do see the roles themselves as something important that need to be "mined" out of privileges. This could be, to some extent, a result of role-centric security model  pushed by J2EE specification in past (and now through SCA Polic