Frank Tompa, A Flexible System for Access Control

A variety of mechanisms have been used in access control systems to support enterprises' diverse security needs. For example, some enterprises might allow individual users to assign privileges on files that they own, whereas others might require that permissions be granted and revoked by security administrators only; some enterprises wish to operate under closed access policies (where permission is denied unless explicitly granted), whereas others prefer to allow access only if the number of positive authorizations exceeds the number of negative ones. We will explore two frameworks, namely creation time policies and conflict resolution policies, that together allow software vendors to support a wide variety of discretionary access control mechanisms using a single code base. About the speaker: Frank Tompa has been on the faculty in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo since 1974. His teaching and research interests are in the fields of data structures and databases, particularly the design of text management systems suitable for maintaining large reference texts and large, heterogeneous text collections. He has co-authored papers in the areas of database dependency theory, storage structure selection, query processing, materialized view maintenance, text matching, XML processing, structured text conversion, database integration, data retention and security, and text classification. In 2005, the University of Waterloo and the City of Waterloo announced the naming of the road Frank Tompa Drive in recognition of Professor Tompa being one of those who "epitomize the energy and enterprise that characterize the University of Waterloo." In 2010, he was named a Fellow of the ACM for contributions to text-dominated and semi-structured data management.