A Study on Current Research and Challenges in Attribute-based Access Control Model

Access control models are used to identify and detect anonymous users or attacks when sharing big data or other resources in the distributed environment such as cloud, edge, and fog computing. The attribute-based access control model (ABAC) is a promising model used in intrusion detection systems. Comparing with the primary access control models: discretionary access control model (DAC), mandatory access control model (MAC), and role-based access control model, ABAC gets attention in the current research due to its flexibility, efficiency, and granularity. Despite ABAC is performing well in addressing the security requirements of today’s computing technologies, there are open challenges such as policy errors, scalability, delegations, and policy representation with heterogeneous datasets. This paper presents the fundamental concepts of ABAC and a review of current research works toward framing efficient ABAC models. This paper identifies and discusses the current challenges in ABAC based on the study and analysis of the surveyed works.