UCAT: The Uniform Categorization for Access Control

The basic primitives of access control models evolve together with the development of new technologies. The increased availability of computers in organizations brought the notion of roles in, the growing popularity of online social networks led to access control models based on relationships. The new era introduces new challenges. One of those is related to data management in collaborative platforms. Being involved in numerous collaborations, the users need convenient solutions to express their access control preferences. In this paper we address this problem by developing an access control model based on categorization. Relying on evidence from cognitive science, we employ categories as a natural primitive for expressing users’ access control preferences. We develop our model using a fragment of hybrid logic and evaluate its performance in a simulated environment.