Welcome to VisABAC
Authoring and editing access control policies can be a complicated and cognitive-demanding task, especially when dealing with complex ones. Visualisation techniques are known to be helpful to users analysing intricate data, and can, in some contexts, help decreasing the cognitive load.
VisABAC pursues the visualisation of attribute based access control policies using visualisation techniques (diagrams, colour schemes, patterns...). At this moment is favouring Zoomable Circle Packing as the preferred visualisation technique but other visualisations are being investigated as well and are planned for future releases.
VisABAC is an ongoing effort coordinated at Newcastle University and aspires to provide varied visualisation approaches to attribute based access control policies management, both to educative and professional purposes. It is distributed under an MIT license and we invite you to contribute.
This web page provides acess to an online visualiser prototype and a subject test.
VisABAC was created using web technologies in order to ease its future deployment. It requires enabled Javascript to work properly.
Pressing Visualiser at the end of this page will load a general purpose tool.
The visualiser can be used to explore new and old policies, it is under constant revision and bug fixing. It uses a modified Zoomable Circle Packing tehcnique as visualisation engine.
Pressing Test at the end of this page will load a timed quiz.
The test was used to measure usability issues and performance. The test code has been frozen to preserve the exact circumstances presented to subjects during the testing phase of the tool conducted from January through March, 2017. As a consequence, bugs that may have been fixed in the visualiser tool may still be present in the test.
Pressing Visualiser with Foldable Tree at the end of this page will load a candidate general purpose tool.
The visualiser can be used to explore new and old policies, it is under constant revision and bug fixing. It uses a modified Zoomable Foldable Tree technique as visualisation engine.
A suitable Help will be enabled at all times by clicking the button at the top right.