Semantic Attribute-Based Access Control: A review on current status and future perspectives

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) uses the attributes of the involved entities (i.e., subject, object, action, and environment) to provide access control. Despite various advantages offered by ABAC, it is not the best fit for distributed and heterogeneous environments where the attributes of an entity may not necessarily match (syntactically) those used in the access control policies. Therefore, another type of access control called Semantic Attribute-Based Access Control (SABAC) has emerged that takes into account the semantics of attributes by combining ABAC with semantic technologies. SABAC not only facilitates interoperability but also enhances the expressiveness of access control policies. Over the last decade, a number of research efforts have been conducted in developing semantic attribute-based access control schemes. However, there exists no survey paper on SABAC schemes, giving an overview of the existing approaches. Hence, this paper comprehensively reviews the conducted research efforts for developing SABAC. The main goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive summary of the conducted research studies that is useful for researchers who want to enter and make contributions to this field. Furthermore, the paper identifies open problems and possible research entry points by demonstrating the advantages and disadvantages of the previous studies.