Intent-Based Access Control: Using LLMs to Intelligently Manage Access Control

In every enterprise database, administrators must define an access control policy that specifies which users have access to which assets. Access control straddles two worlds: policy (organization-level principles that define who should have access) and process (database-level primitives that actually implement the policy). Assessing and enforcing process compliance with a policy is a manual and ad-hoc task. This paper introduces a new paradigm for access control called Intent-Based Access Control for Databases (IBAC-DB). In IBAC-DB, access control policies are expressed more precisely using a novel format, the natural language access control matrix (NLACM). Database access control primitives are synthesized automatically from these NLACMs. These primitives can be used to generate new DB configurations and/or evaluate existing ones. This paper presents a reference architecture for an IBAC-DB interface, an initial implementation for PostgreSQL (which we call LLM4AC), and initial benchmarks that evaluate the accuracy and scope of such a system. We find that our chosen implementation, LLM4AC, vastly outperforms other baselines, achieving near-perfect F1 scores on our initial benchmarks.