Modeling and design of role engineering in development of access control for dynamic information systems

Abstract Nowadays, the growth and complexity of functionalities of current information systems, especially dynamic, distributed and heterogeneous information systems, makes the design and creation of such systems a difficult task and at the same time, strategic for businesses. A very important stage of data protection in an information system is the creation of a high level model, independent of the software, satisfying the needs of system protection and security. The process of role engineering, i.e. the identification of roles and setting up in an organization is a complex task. The paper presents the modeling and design stages in the process of role engineering in the aspect of security schema development for information systems, in particular for dynamic, distributed information systems, based on the role concept and the usage concept. Such a schema is created first of all during the design phase of a system. Two actors should cooperate with each other in this creation process, the application developer and the security administrator, to determine the minimal set of user’s roles in agreement with the security constraints that guarantee the global security coherence of the system.