A Prototype for Transforming Role-Based Access Control Models

Role-based access control is a widely-used mechanism in computer systems – it ensures security by restricting resource access to only the system users with respective rights. The RBAC solutions can be engineered with the aid of modelling languages, such as SecureUML and UMLsec, which both present the system design from different viewpoints. Creating multiple coherent models, however, may turn out to be a non-trivial and time-consuming task. This, in turn, may dramatically lessen the motivation to create role-based access control models altogether. As a solution to the problem above, developers could be provided a software tool, which inputs a model in one language and transforms it into the model of another. The transformed model, however, would not be complete, since the two languages are used to represent somewhat different information. The aim of such a tool would be to diminish the necessity to manually copy information, when creating a second model. With this thesis, a prototype tool is developed, which enables the transformation of a SecureUML model to a UMLsec model and vice versa. The tool is implemented in th