A general approach to securely querying XML

XML access control requires the enforcement of highly expressive access control policies to support schema-, document and object-specific protection requirements. Access control models for XML data can be classified in two major categories: node filtering and query rewriting systems. The first category includes approaches that use access policies to compute secure user views on XML data sets. User queries are then evaluated on those views. In the second category of approaches, authorization rules are used to transform user queries to be evaluated against the original XML data set. The pros and cons for these approaches have been widely discussed in the framework of XML access control standardization activities. The aim of this paper is to describe a model combining the advantages of these approaches and overcoming their limitations, suitable as the basis of a standard technique for XML access control enforcement. The model specification is given using a Finite State Automata, ensuring generality w.r.t. specific implementation techniques.