ALFA (XACML)

ALFA, the Abbreviated Language For Authorization, is a pseudocode language used in the formulation of access-control policies.

History

Origin

XACML, the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language, uses XML as its main encoding language. Developers have always struggled to write XML and therefore a new, more lightweight, notation was necessary. Axiomatics researcher, Pablo Giambiagi, therefore designed ALFA, the Axiomatics Language for Authorization.

ALFA maps directly into XACML. ALFA contains the same structural elements as XACML i.e. PolicySet, Policy, and Rule.

Axiomatics donates ALFA to OASIS

In March 2014, Axiomatics announced it was donating ALFA to the OASIS XACML Technical Committee in order to advance its standardization.

ALFA was consequently renamed Abbreviated Language for Authorization and filed for standardization. Its current version can be accessed here.

Sample Use Cases

Alfa

Alfa may refer to:

Alfa (rocket)

Alfa was the designation of an Italian solid propellant intermediate-range ballistic missile program that started in 1971 under the control of the GRS (Gruppo di Realizzazione Speciale Interforze). Starting as a development effort for a study on efficient solid-propellant rockets, the Alfa rocket was planned as a two-stage rocket. Test launches with an upper stage mockup took place between 1973 and 1975, from Salto di Quirra.

The Alfa was 6.5 metres (21 ft) long and had a diameter of 1.37 metres (4 ft 6 in). The first stage of the Alfa was 3.85 metres (12.6 ft) long and contained 6 t of solid rocket fuel. It supplied a thrust of 232 kN for a duration of 57 seconds.

It was capable of carrying a warhead of 1 Mt and had a range of 1,600 kilometres (990 mi), which meant that it could reach all eastern countries and the western USSR if launched from frigates or destroyers in the Adriatic Sea. Italy has been active in the space sector since 1957, conducting launch and control operations from the Luigi Broglio Space Centre. The advanced Scout and Vega launchers currently used by the European Space Agency (ESA) derive their technological basis partially from Alfa studies.

Alfa (Lebanon)

Alfa is one of the two operating GSM networks in Lebanon, side by side with MTC Touch.

Overview

Alfa is the network name for Mobile Interim Company 1 (MIC1) founded in 1994 with the name of Cellis which was managed by France Telecom until 2004.

In 2004 the Lebanese government signed a management contract with FAL-DETE to operate MIC1 network for 4 years. FAL-DETE substituted Cellis by Alfa.

Since 2009 Orascom is managing MIC1. Since 2010 Marwan Hayek is the CEO for Alfa.

Alfa and MTC charge customers among the highest rates in the world.

According to Zain Group's report published in June 2014, Alfa is reported to have 1.8 million subscribers, the numbers have grown significantly with the influx of over a million Syrian refugees in the last two and half years.

See also

References

External links

XACML

XACML stands for "eXtensible Access Control Markup Language". The standard defines a declarative access control policy language implemented in XML and a processing model describing how to evaluate access requests according to the rules defined in policies.

As a published standard specification, one of the goals of XACML is to promote common terminology and interoperability between access control implementations by multiple vendors. XACML is primarily an Attribute Based Access Control system (ABAC), where attributes (bits of data) associated with a user or action or resource are inputs into the decision of whether a given user may access a given resource in a particular way. Role-based access control (RBAC) can also be implemented in XACML as a specialization of ABAC.

The XACML model supports and encourages the separation of the access decision from the point of use. When access decisions are baked into client applications (or based on local machine userids and Access Control Lists (ACLs)), it is very difficult to update the decision criteria when the governing policy changes. When the client is decoupled from the access decision, authorization policies can be updated on the fly and affect all clients immediately.