What is RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) and Why is it Important?
A pivotal part of meeting security, privacy and compliance challenges in increasingly complex IT environments is having a secure access control method. Imagine a software engineer who typically works in development or staging environments has access to your production server. This means the engineer has broad access to multiple systems, including customer databases, financial records and confidential project files.
If this engineer’s credentials were compromised by a hacker, you’d likely find yourself knee-deep in a serious data breach, all stemming from access levels that weren’t needed for that engineer’s role. This is exactly the type of situation RBAC aims to solve. Here’s the lowdown on what RBAC is and why it’s so important.
What is RBAC?
Role-based access control (RBAC) assigns access permissions to specific roles, rather than individual users. After defining roles, you then assign your users to those roles, which simplifies the management of permissions across your company while making things more secure. David Ferraiolo and Richard Kuhn of NIST formalized the concept of RBAC in a 1992 National Computer Security Conference paper titled “Role-Based Access Controls.”
Combining roles with policies that govern authentication and authorization for your IT assets (apps, data, etc.) provides a foundation for robust identity and access management. This access control model ensures that only authorized users can access specific resources or perform certain actions. While it sounds like a straightforward concept, implementing RBAC effectively in the context of complex IT environments with SaaS apps, cloud services and container orchestration platforms is tricky.
A role is just a grouped set of permissions based on the functions or responsibilities of a specific job title (think HR Manager, System Admin, Sales Representative). Permissions for roles might include actions like “read access to customer data,” “write access to financial records,” or “execute system commands.” There are three broad types of RBAC models that are worth understanding because they’ll help clarify how complex your implementation needs to be:
- Flat RBAC—This is the simplest form of RBAC, in that there are no role hierarchies or constraints in the model. Flat RBAC is suitable for smaller IT environments where access needs are straightforward and there isn’t a wide diversity of different roles.
- Hierarchical RBAC—In this model, you organize roles into a hierarchy, which facilitates role inheritance. For example, a “Senior Engineer” role might inherit all the permissions of a “Junior Engineer” role along with additional permissions. Hierarchical RBAC simplifies permission management by reducing redundancy in role definitions. It also naturally maps onto many standard organizational structures, where roles have hierarchical levels of seniority or responsibility.
- Constrained RBAC—Constrained RBAC is a more advanced way to implement this type of access control by enforcing strict limitations on role assignments to prevent conflicts of interest and reduce the risk of fraud, errors or unauthorized actions. Central here is the idea of separation of duties to ensure no single individual has control over all aspects of any critical process. For example, one person should not be able to both initiate and approve payments. You’ll usually base duty separation on internal policies or specific legal requirements. Financial institutions, healthcare organizations and companies in other compliance-driven industries will find this model useful.
Benefits of RBAC
Enhanced identity security
Attacks that compromise identities remain widespread—Crowdstrike estimates that 80 percent of cyberattacks involve stolen or compromised credentials. It’s not that RBAC stops credentials from being compromised, but it does limit the potential attack surface. RBAC reduces the attack surface by making sure users are limited in what they can do within your environment if their accounts happen to get hacked.
Properly implemented, RBAC enables you to enforce the principle of least privilege by ensuring that users only have the access they need to perform their job functions, and nothing more. This is pertinent given that almost half of companies admit that some of their users have access privileges beyond what they need for their daily work.
Operational efficiency
RBAC simplifies granting and revoking access to people, which in turn reduces the admin burden on IT and HR teams. Instead of manually configuring access for each user, admins can manage access at the role level. This efficiency allows for quicker onboarding, changes in responsibility and offboarding of employees or contractors.
Clearer audit trails and better compliance
RBAC provides a clear, auditable structure for access management. By organizing access permissions around roles, it’s easier for your business to track and report who has access to what resources and why. This is crucial for demonstrating compliance with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, SOX or CMMC, which call for strict control and reporting on access to sensitive data. Also, you can even use RBAC to create compliance-specific roles that automatically restrict access to only compliant environments or resources.
Considerations When Using RBAC
One challenge that often crops up is “role explosion,” where the number of roles increases to the point of becoming unmanageable. This happens when you try to create highly specific roles to accommodate the nuances of job functions and their access requirements.
Also, make sure to combine RBAC with multi-factor authentication (MFA) for sensitive roles. This adds an extra layer of security like a one-time password or biometric scans, especially for high-privilege roles like system administrators or finance managers.
Ideally, you’ll integrate RBAC with a centralized identity and access management (IAM) system. This allows for unified, centralized control over user identities, roles and permissions across the business, including cloud and on-premise systems. Centralizing things reduces the risks of misconfigurations or other errors that put security at risk.
Get strategic support for RBAC
Strengthening access controls by implementing RBAC is a smart move, given the ongoing prevalence of identity-based cyberattacks. Nuspire’s cybersecurity consulting services can help out by diving deep and truly understanding your environment and access control needs. We’ll help develop policies and standards and securely implement RBAC.
