authorizationranging

Authorization ranging is a concept in access control that describes the process of determining a user's permissions by mapping credentials to a continuum of authorization levels across resources and actions. Unlike traditional binary allow/deny models, authorization ranging assigns a range of permissible operations to a subject, often expressed as a minimum and maximum level of access or as a graded spectrum across resource classes, actions, or data sensitivity. The range may be multidimensional, incorporating factors such as resource category, operation type, data sensitivity, time constraints, and contextual signals like location or device trust.

Policy and enforcement: A policy engine evaluates subject attributes, resource characteristics, and contextual data to compute the authorized range for a given interaction. The resulting range then constrains or enables specific actions, with decisions typically enforced at the point of access. This approach complements established models such as RBAC, ABAC, and PBAC by adding a continuum of access rather than fixed roles or permissions.

Applications: Authorization ranging is proposed for complex or scalable environments, including multi-tenant cloud platforms, data lakes, healthcare information systems, and collaborative research environments, where users require different authorization levels across datasets, services, or workflows.

Benefits and challenges: The approach can improve fine-grained control, reduce over-privilege, and support dynamic, context-aware decisions. Challenges include defining meaningful range semantics, managing policy complexity, ensuring fast decision latency, and maintaining auditable provenance and revocation.

Relation to standards: There are no widely adopted formal standards specifically for authorization ranging; it is typically implemented as an architectural extension of existing access control models, leveraging standard policy languages and attribute mechanisms.