In recent years, Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) has become quite
popular and effective for enforcing access control in dynamic and collaborative
environments. Implementation of ABAC requires the creation of a set of
attribute-based rules which cumulatively form a policy. Designing an ABAC
policy ab initio demands a substantial amount of effort from the system
administrator. Moreover, organizational changes may necessitate the inclusion
of new rules in an already deployed policy. In such a case, re-mining the
entire ABAC policy will require a considerable amount of time and
administrative effort. Instead, it is better to incrementally augment the
policy. Keeping these aspects of reducing administrative overhead in mind, in
this paper, we propose PAMMELA, a Policy Administration Methodology using
Machine Learning to help system administrators in creating new ABAC policies as
well as augmenting existing ones. PAMMELA can generate a new policy for an
organization by learning the rules of a policy currently enforced in a similar
organization. For policy augmentation, PAMMELA can infer new rules based on the
knowledge gathered from the existing rules. Experimental results show that our
proposed approach provides a reasonably good performance in terms of the
various machine learning evaluation metrics as well as execution time.