A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF MODERN APPROACHES TO ROLE-BASED ACCESS CONTROL: SECURITY MECHANISMS, DOMAIN-SPECIFIC ADAPTATIONS, AND VALIDATION TECHNIQUES

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) remains a foundational paradigm for securing information systems, yet its implementation and enhancement vary significantly across different application domains and evolving threat landscapes.This paper presents a comparative literature review of seven recent scholarly articles, examining diverse approaches to RBAC.The review focuses on comparing the core access control models proposed, the integration of supplementary security mechanisms such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) and trust-based systems, the application of RBAC in specific domains including cloud computing, e-healthcare, educational systems, and government services, and the methodologies employed for policy specification and system validation, such as XACML, formal methods (Alloy, Scyther), and performance analysis.Key comparative insights reveal a trend towards domain-specific RBAC adaptations, the increasing necessity of MFA, the exploration of dynamic elements like trust and delegation, and a growing emphasis on formal verification to ensure policy correctness and system robustness.The review synthesizes these findings to highlight common challenges, divergent solutions, and identifies collective strengths, weaknesses, and emergent gaps in the current research landscape, offering implications for future research and practice in access control.