Article: MTD-integrated ABAC: integrating moving target defence into attribute-based access control for insider threat mitigation Journal: International Journal of Information and Computer Security (IJICS) 2026 Vol.29 No.2 pp.227 - 247 Abstract: Insider threats are prevalent security issues for organisations. While attribute-based access control (ABAC) systems manage sensitive data, they are not fully effective against insider threats. We propose integrating moving target defence (MTD) into ABAC systems to mitigate these threats. Our approach enhances the ABAC system with three modules: 1) a correlated attribute generator to estimate correlations among attribute-value pairs; 2) a policy sensitivity estimator to determine sensitivity levels of policy rules; 3) a mutation engine to dynamically mutate sensitive policy rules using correlated attributes. We evaluated our framework using a real-world dataset from an educational system, assessing the efficiency of the attribute generator, efficiency of the sensitivity estimator, overhead from the MTD components, and the framework's overall performance. Our results show that with a dataset of 200,000 records and 13 policy rules, the framework identified five sensitive rules and achieved a 100% mitigation rate without excessive overhead. Inderscience Publishers - linking academia, business and industry through research

Title: MTD-integrated ABAC: integrating moving target defence into attribute-based access control for insider threat mitigation

Authors: Olusesi Balogun; Mohammad GhasemiGol; Zhipeng Cai; Daniel Takabi

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA ' Department of Computer Science and School of Cybersecurity, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, 23529, USA ' Department of Computer Science, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA ' School of Cybersecurity, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, USA

Abstract: Insider threats are prevalent security issues for organisations. While attribute-based access control (ABAC) systems manage sensitive data, they are not fully effective against insider threats. We propose integrating moving target defence (MTD) into ABAC systems to mitigate these threats. Our approach enhances the ABAC system with three modules: 1) a correlated attribute generator to estimate correlations among attribute-value pairs; 2) a policy sensitivity estimator to determine sensitivity levels of policy rules; 3) a mutation engine to dynamically mutate sensitive policy rules using correlated attributes. We evaluated our framework using a real-world dataset from an educational system, assessing the efficiency of the attribute generator, efficiency of the sensitivity estimator, overhead from the MTD components, and the framework's overall performance. Our results show that with a dataset of 200,000 records and 13 policy rules, the framework identified five sensitive rules and achieved a 100% mitigation rate without excessive overhead.

Keywords: insider threat; moving target defence; MTD; attribute-based access control; ABAC; correlated attributes; policy sensitivity; policy mutation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICS.2026.151315

International Journal of Information and Computer Security, 2026 Vol.29 No.2, pp.227 - 247

Received: 24 Feb 2025
Accepted: 03 Aug 2025
Published online: 22 Jan 2026 *

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Title: MTD-integrated ABAC: integrating moving target defence into attribute-based access control for insider threat mitigation

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