Paper Title: CWA-ABAC: Reducing Authorization Workload in ABAC through Exact Policy Certification and Attribute Ordering

Author:

Dipanjan Sarkhel¹,  Sourajit Chakravarty², Bipasha Chakrabarti Banik³
and Bijitaswa Chakraborty⁴
¹Research Scholar, Centre for Data Science, JIS Institute of Advanced Studies and Research (JISIASR), Santragachi, India
²Research Scholar, Centre for Data Science, JIS Institute of Advanced Studies and Research (JISIASR), Santragachi, India
³Research Scholar, Centre for Data Science, JIS Institute of Advanced Studies and Research (JISIASR), Santragachi, India
⁴Assistant Professor, Centre for Data Science, JIS Institute of Advanced Studies and Research (JISIASR), Santragachi, India
DOI Link (Crossref) Prefix: https://doi.org/10.63431/AIJITR/3.IV.2026.132-138
AIJITR, Volume 3, Issue –IV, July - August, 2026, PP.132-138
Received on 21th July, 2026 & Accepted on 31st July, 2026, 
Published: 25th August, 2026.
The statement “Copyright © by Author” (The author retains the copyright to the published article.)

Abstract:

Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) provides fine-grained authorization by evaluating multiple attributes of an access request against policy rules. We observe that this evaluation can perform unnecessary computation when a smaller set of attributes is already sufficient to determine the access decision. In this work, we propose CWA-ABAC (Computational-Workload-Aware Attribute-Based Access Control) to reduce such unnecessary authorization computation without changing the underlying policy. We first construct complete policy contexts from the Amazon Employee Access Challenge dataset and identify policy prefixes that are sufficient to determine an authorization decision. We then examine different attribute evaluation orders and select the order that minimizes the modeled authorization workload. We use exact policy certification to ensure that an authorization request stops only when its decision is uniquely determined. We also compare the workload of the optimized ordering with a fixed attribute ordering and with complete policy evaluation. Our observations show that a large portion of requests can be resolved before evaluating all available attributes and that the ordering of attributes affects the computational workload of authorization. We further observe that workload reduction can be achieved while maintaining the original authorization decisions. These findings indicate that ABAC efficiency can be improved by optimizing the authorization evaluation process rather than modifying the underlying policy structure.

Keywords:Attribute-Based Access Control, Computational Workload, Policy Certification, Attribute Ordering

DOI Link – https://doi.org/10.63431/AIJITR/3.IV.2026.132-138

Review By – Dr. Shivalika Sarkar and Dr. Chandan Adhikary