A role-based access control model for XML repositories

XML has recently attracted many software vendors, business organizations and research institutions over the world as a promising way to represent Web information. The availability of large amounts of XML data on the Web raises several issues that the XML standard does not address. In particular, access control and authorization issues have seldom been addressed. Since XML are usually stored in multiple sources or repositories, discretionary access control is desirable, if it is not necessary. In this paper, we propose a role-based access control (RBAC) model for XML repositories. The resultant RBAC scheme is in XML and heavily relies on XPath.