Public Comment

[comment-form@oasis-open.org]

Comment from: rgrzywinski@yahoo.com

I'd like to add use cases to the XACML 2.0 work item #9 (Policies referring to hierarchical resources).

The current work item refers to three cases:

o  all descendents of a particular node in a hierarchy
o  all immediate children of a particular node in a hierarchy
o  a particular node in a hierarchy

These three cases only cover a small subset of the policy used in the current web access control products.  For example, refer to section 7.2 (Enhanced URI Wildcarding) of:

  http://www.rsasecurity.com/products/cleartrust/whitepapers/CTOVNF_WP_0903.pdf

for use cases.

I feel that a stronger and more flexible solution is needed for this problem.  Perhaps a limited set of regex functions following XPath 2.0 pattern matching:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery-operators/#string.match

which is already exposed as "regexp-string-match" but only for strings (and not as XPath expressions).  

I do recognize the dangers in adding dependencies to as-of-yet-finalized specifications.  As long as the use cases are recognized, they could be added as a post XACML 2.0 addition contingent on the finalization of XPath 2.0.

-- 
Rob Grzywinski