Custominer: Mining Customized Access Control Policies under User-Defined Constraints

Access control policies play a critical role in securing sensitive data and protecting personal rights in environments such as cloud computing and IoT. These policies, typically created by sysadmins, specify which users are authorized to access specific resources under certain conditions. However, the manual creation and revision of these policies to align with security objectives is often error-prone and labor-intensive. In this paper, we present Custominer, a policy mining tool designed to assist sysadmins in proactively generating and customizing access control policies that meet predefined security requirements. Custominer enables sysadmins to define security goals as constraints, and then automatically mines policies that satisfy these constraints from access logs. The policy mining task is framed as a local search optimization problem, utilizing a MaxSAT solver to efficiently eliminate suboptimal policy candidates. Our experiments, conducted on four real-world datasets, show that Custominer outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.