Authors:
Charles Morisset
1
and
David Sanchez
2
Affiliations:
1
Newcastle University, United Kingdom
;
2
Northumbria University, United Kingdom
Keyword(s):
Circle Packing, Visualisation, User Study, Attribute-based Access Control.
Abstract:
Authoring and editing access control policy can be a complex and cognitive demanding task, especially when
dealing with a large number of rules and attributes. Visualisation techniques are known to be helpful to
users analysing intricate data, and can, in some contexts, help decreasing the cognitive load. In this paper,
we propose a new tool, VisABAC, which enables the visualisation of attribute based access control policies
using the Circle Packing method. We used a participatory design, following a survey of existing visualisation
methods in access control. VisABAC is designed as a web-page component, developed in Javascript using
the D3.js library, and as such is easily usable without requiring any particular setup. In addition to presenting
VisABAC, we demonstrate its usability by conducting a controlled experiment with 32 participants, asking
them to change some attribute values in order to obtain a given decision for a policy, and measuring the time
taken by participan
ts to conduct these tasks (the faster, the better). We show a small to medium effect size
(d =0:44), thus indicating that VisABAC is a promising tool for authoring and editing access control policies.
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