in subject behavior and other threats that could pass
unnoticed to a simple rule-based system.
5 COUNTER ARGUMENT
Traditionally, the implementation of access control
systems is based on three concepts: access control
policies, models and mechanisms (Samarati and de
Vimercati, 2001). In this context both the security
properties of the system as well as its theoretical
limitations can be proved and properly bounded
respectively by the formal representation of the
policies, that is, the model. In the case of a cognitive
system this assessment may be more difficult to
achieve as it may prove challenging to provide a
formal model that can accurately express non-
determinism in a formal way.
The access control mechanism itself is typically
characterized by at least four properties: tamper-
proof, non-bypassable, security-kernel and small
(Samarati and de Vimercati, 2001). From these, the
first and the last two can pose some concerns when
addressing cognitive systems.
Concerning the first property, tamper-proof, it
should be stated that a cognitive system, as opposed
to traditional programmable systems, is in an ongoing
change. That is, the system should continuously learn
to improve itself. In the worst-case scenario, the
system can tamper itself due to this continuous
changing process. The corpus, that is, the knowledge
base of the cognitive system also poses concerns in
this regard, as the data ingested directly reflects its
behavior. Untrusted sources of information can
potentially alter the system in subtle ways, by
continuously feeding it malicious data over time. This
type of attack can be very hard to discern or even
prevent.
The last two properties, security-kernel and small,
deserve also some remarks. Cognitive systems are far
more demanding in terms of infrastructure and are
certainly larger and more complex when compared
with traditional deterministic systems such as the
ones that implement DAC, MAC, RBAC, etc.
Cognitive systems need to ingest and process large
amounts of data in a timely fashion to allow for the
decision making. On top of this the system must
generate, score, rank and provide evidence in a
potentially high number of hypotheses to compute
every access control decision, increasing the time to
reach a decision. This decision in turn must consider
context and, for the machine to perceive context,
techniques and algorithms such as Machine Learning,
Artificial Neural Networks and Natural Language
Processing must be used. Thus, for a cognitive system
to be of any use, the underlying software and
hardware architectures must allow for parallelism and
distributed data management. This also means that
the cognitive system can potentially be composed of
many small components spread over many different
parts of the system, making it hard to discern its
boundaries. Such a system can be harder to assess and
verify.
Another factor to take into account is the so called
“before the fact audit” (Ferraiolo et al., 2016), one of
the prominent features of RBAC and also a desired
feature of access control. What this means is that it is
possible to audit the permissions of users as well as
the access rules assigned to the resources of the
system. In a cognitive system, such a review may not
be easy to perform. Concerning the review of the
permissions of the user, as these are determined in
terms of probabilistic models they are therefore
volatile. Reviewing the access rules assigned to the
system resources can also prove difficult, as policies
must be translated into a suitable form, often
mathematical, becoming more opaque to human
interpretation. In this regard the cognitive system can
be seen almost the same as a black box.
In terms of its implementation and deployment in
the enterprise, the adoption of a cognitive system can
also prove to be costly and challenging. Also, some
expertise on the subject is required to properly train,
configure and continuously assess for the proper
behavior of the cognitive system over time and as
policies change within the enterprise. This in turn
may lead to a scenario of vendor lock-in or high
vendor dependency.
Finally, there might be ethical or even legal
compliance concerns, posing some doubts about the
implementation of a cognitive system as an access
control mechanism. This can be of particular
importance in highly sensitive scenarios, where the
access to data is legislated and noncompliance may
implicate legal sanctions, such as the HIPAA legal
framework (Congress, 1996). Leaving the access
decision entirely to the cognitive system in this case
can raise traceability and accountability problems in
case of improper disclosure of data or non-
conformity. Ultimately cognitive systems as a
technology are still not mature enough as opposed to
other deterministic access control models such as
RBAC. Furthermore, the probabilistic nature and
black box approach of such systems can prove
difficult for their adoption in highly sensitive
scenarios.
Table 1 summarizes the information discussed
thus far between the techniques used in deterministic
and non-deterministic models, which is based on our
experience and the literature. The scale follows a low
(L), medium (M), high (H) metric. The categories for
comparison are as follows: ease of configuration