Rolefrom

Rolefrom is a term used in discussions of access control and policy modelling to denote an operation that derives or assigns a user role from a source of attributes or context. The term is not standardized and appears primarily in informal descriptions of policy languages and rule engines. It can be implemented as a rule or function within an authorization system to compute a role based on user attributes, environmental context, or provenance data.

In practice, a rolefrom rule might specify: if a user has department = Sales and clearanceLevel >= 3, then the derived role is 'SalesSenior'. The resulting role may be used for subsequent authorization decisions or to populate user interfaces. The output can be a single role or a set of roles and may be subject to conflicts with preexisting assignments or other inference rules.

Rolefrom contrasts with direct role assignment or hard-coded mappings by emphasizing derivation from attributes and context, enabling dynamic access control decisions. It is related to concepts such as role inference, attribute-based access control (ABAC), and policy-based access control, where roles can emerge from evolving user attributes rather than being fixed by manual provisioning.

Implementation considerations include determinism, auditability, and conflict resolution, as well as performance in rule evaluation and the maintenance burden of attribute schemas. Rolefrom is most applicable in systems that require context-aware authorization and where roles should reflect current attributes rather than static labels.

See also: role-based access control, ABAC, policy-based access control, inference rules, attribute mapping.