ENTERPRISE WIDE CENTRALIZED APPLICATION LEVEL ACCESS CONTROL USING XACML

In traditional approach, enterprise-wide consistent security policy enforcement for applications is very difficult task. Therefore, industry is now moving towards new unified enterprise application security concept that consist of centralized authentication and authorization mechanism. The eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML); an XML-based standard defined by OASIS, is most suitable choice which can support centralized, role based, context aware access control mechanism. It is designed to provide universal standard for writing authorization policies and access control request/response language for managing access to the resources. This paper includes a brief overview on XACML and discusses its benefits, limitations and a data flow process. We propose a new generic access control architecture that supports enterprise wide centralized application level access control mechanism using XACML. The other benefits which can be achieved through this architecture are, reduce adnministration cost and complexity, support of heterogeneous computing platforms, centralized monitoring system, automatic fail over, scalability and availability, open standard based solution and secure communication.