US Patent 9137265 Generating role-based access control policies based on discovered risk-averse roles

Generating role-based access control policies is provided. A user-permission relation is generated by extracting users and permissions assigned to each of the users from a stored access control policy. A user-attribute relation is generated by mapping the users to attributes describing the users. A permission-attribute relation is generated by mapping the permissions to attributes describing the permissions. The set of risk-averse roles, assignment of the set of risk-averse roles to the users, and assignment of the permissions to the set of risk-averse roles are determined based on applying a risk-optimization function to the generated user-permission relation, the generated user-attribute relation, and the generated permission-attribute relation. A role-based access control policy that minimizes a risk profile of the set of risk-averse roles, the assignment of the set of risk-averse roles to the users, and the assignment of the permissions to the set of risk-averse roles is generated.