What is Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)?
Developed by NIST in the early 1990s, RBAC functions by linking access permissions to roles, which are then assigned to users who may have one or more roles, each with different access rights. When employees join, move within, or leave the organization, administrators adjust their assigned roles, automatically granting or removing permissions.
RBAC enabled organizations to manage access efficiently through role assignments, streamlining user provisioning, and lifecycle management. Roles could be flat or hierarchical, representing business functions or activities, and were designed to simplify the management of user permissions across systems. The model’s simplicity made it popular for decades, providing structure and governance for enterprise-scale access control.
The Limitations of RBAC
However, as enterprises grew in scale and complexity, RBAC began showing significant limitations in the new organizational landscape:
- Role Explosion: Accommodation to diverse user needs requires an exponential increase in the number of roles, making it unsustainable to manage.
- Toxic Combinations: Overlapping or conflicting role assignments could create security risks (e.g., a user might be simultaneously allowed to create and approve payments).
- Management Complexity: Maintaining and auditing numerous roles across systems is time-consuming and error prone.
- Lack of Context: RBAC’s static nature only addresses the user’s role and lacks awareness of contextual relationships between users and data, including dynamic conditions like time and location.
RBAC still holds value as a foundation for modern access control. However, just knowing a user’s role is no longer enough to ensure safe and secure access control. To meet new demands, RBAC must evolve to incorporate a more dynamic, context-aware model capable of managing fine-grained access control – Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC). By augmenting RBAC with ABAC principles, organizations can extend traditional roles with attributes (such as location, device type, or time) and enforce policies that adjust automatically based on context.
The Future of Access Control is ABAC
ABAC builds upon RBAC’s strengths by introducing contextual and fine-grained control through attributes and policies. Roles remain an integral part of a successful access control strategy, but instead of managing thousands of static roles, organizations can define flexible, easy-to-understand policies that consider who is accessing what, when, where, and how.
ABAC achieves this by using policies built upon individual attributes using natural language. For example, a policy may be written as follows: “Doctors can view medical records of any patient in their department and update records assigned to them during working hours from approved devices.” An ABAC policy provides robust policy management by expanding the scope of RBAC with contextual attributes in a more flexible and simpler way.
Read the full White Paper for more advanced business scenarios that ABAC supports and expands upon RBAC, including delegation, context-sensitive access, collaboration, and improved user experiences.
How NextLabs Extends RBAC with ABAC
NextLabs provides a Dynamic Authorization Management platform that operationalizes ABAC across enterprise systems and extends RBAC for fine-grained, context-aware access control that can scale with an organization across applications, databases, and APIs.
Key capabilities include:
- Smart Classifier: Automatically classifies and protects sensitive data at scale.
- Control Center: Centralized policy management for scalable, enterprise-wide ABAC enforcement.
- Dynamic Data Masking & Filtering: Enforces business rules directly within applications or databases, showing users only the data they’re authorized to see.
- Entitlement Management Solutions: Prevent internal and external data breaches through automated policy enforcement and activity monitoring.
- Out-of-the-Box (OOTB) Integrations: Extend ABAC policies to custom or third-party applications for unified access governance.
- Enterprise Digital Rights Management (EDRM): Protects data even after it leaves the application through encryption and attribute-based controls.
Together, these capabilities allow enterprises to modernize access control, unify policy enforcement, and ensure compliance without overhauling their existing RBAC infrastructure.
For more detailed business scenarios and solution technologies, read the full white paper.
