Research in the area of role-based access control has made fast progress over the last few years. However, little has been done to identify and describe existing role-based access control systems within large organisations. This paper describes the access control system of a major European Bank. An overview of the systems structure, its administration and existing control principles constraining the administration is given. In addition, we provide an answer to a key question - the ratio of the number of roles to the system user population - which was raised in the recent RBAC2000 Workshop. Having described certain weaknesses of the Banks system, the case study is extended to a comparison between the system and the RBAC96 models. In particular the issues of inheritance and grouping are addressed.
['Andreas Schaad', 'Jonathan D. Moffett', 'Jeremy L. Jacob']
The role-based access control system of a European bank: a case study and discussion