M.Sc. (Computer Science) / Information is a valuable resource in any organisation and more and more organisations are realising this and want efficient means to protect it against disclosure, modification or destruction. Although relatively efficient security methods have been available almost as long as information databases, they all provide additional cost. This cost does not only involve money but also cost in terms of system performance and management of information security. Any new information security model must also provide better management of information security. In this dissertation we present a model that provides information security and aims to lower the technical skills required to manage information security using this approach. In any business organisation we can describe each employee's duties. Put in other words, we can say that each employee has a specific business role in the organisation. In organisations with many employees there are typically many employees that have more or less the same duties in the organisation. This means that employees can be grouped according to their business roles. We use an employee's role as a description of his/her duties in a business organisation. ' Each role needs resources to perform its duties in the organisation. In terms of computer systems, each role needs computer resources such as printers. Most roles need access to data files in the organisation's database but it is not desirable to give all roles access to all data files. It is obvious that roles have specific privileges and restrictions in terms of information resources. Information security can be achieved by identifying the business roles in an organisation and giving these roles only the privileges needed to fulfill their business function and then assigning these roles to people (users of the organisation's computer system). This is called role-based security. People's business functions are related, for example clerks and clerk-managers are related in the sense that a clerk-manager is a manager of clerks. Business roles are related in the same way. For an information security manager to assign roles to users it is important to see this relationship between roles. In this dissertation we present this relationship using a lattice graph which we call a role lattice. The main advantage of this is that it is eases information security management...
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uj/uj:12539 |
| Date | 07 October 2014 |
| Creators | Van der Merwe, Jacobus |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | University of Johannesburg |
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