Delegatable access control for fine-grained XML

The access control mechanisms are critical to ensure security in XML (eXtensible Markup Language). Several such mechanisms have been used or proposed; however, the notion of delegation in XML has not been studied in the literature. In this paper, we propose an access control model encapsuling delegation authorization rules for XML documents that allow flexible data granularity and limited inference protection. Our access control policy specification is basically DTD-based. It can also be considered to be document-based.