Web authorization and performance

The best way to safeguard Web applications while maintaining reliable and fast access involves a combination of robust access control mechanisms and performance optimization techniques for authorization.

First, implementing a well-defined access control model, such as Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), helps streamline security. RBAC simplifies managing permissions by assigning users to roles, and roles to permissions. This simplifies policy administration, reduces errors, and allows for more efficient authorization checks compared to granting individual permissions. For instance, instead of explicitly granting 'read' access to a document for every user, you assign users to a 'Viewer' role which has 'read' access. This approach is detailed in sources like the NIST/ITL Bulletin on An Introduction to Role-based Access Control.

Second, to ensure reliability and speed, authorization decisions should be efficient. This can be achieved through:

• Caching Authorization Decisions: Once a user's permissions or role-based access rights are determined, these decisions can be cached. This prevents repeated, computationally expensive lookups or policy evaluations for every subsequent request, significantly speeding up access.
• Decentralized Authorization: Employing a distributed authorization model can enhance reliability and scalability by spreading the authorization load across multiple points, reducing single points of failure and improving response times. Kahan's "A distributed authorization model for WWW" highlights this approach.
• Optimized Policy Enforcement Points: The software components responsible for enforcing access control policies should be highly optimized to make quick decisions.

Combining these methods ensures that while Web applications are strongly protected through structured access control, the authorization process itself does not become a bottleneck, thereby maintaining fast and reliable user access, as discussed in general principles of network security like those found in Guide to Computer Network Security by Joseph Migga Kizza.