Credential-Based Policies Management in an Access Control Framework Protecting XML Resources

XML has been widely adopted for Web data representation undervarious applications (such as DBMSs, Digital Libraries etc). Therefore, accessto XML data sources has become a crucial issue. In this paper we introduce acredential-based access control framework for protecting XML resources. Underthis framework, we propose the use of access policy files containing policiesconcerning a specific credentials type. Moreover, we propose the reorganizationof the policies in these files based on their frequency of use (the morefrequently it is used the higher in the file it is placed). Our main goal is to improverequest servicing times. Several experiments have been conducted whichare carried out either on single request or on multiple requests base. The proposedframework is proven quite beneficial for protecting XML-based frameworkssuch as digital libraries or any other data resources whose format is expressedin XML.