Role Sprawl: How to Keep RBAC from Growing Out of Control

The term role sprawl, role proliferation or role explosion describes a common problem in administering role-based access control models. Over time, organizations often end up with far too many roles because they set up a unique role for every edge case and new situation.

Role sprawl makes role-based access models challenging to administrate and places significant strain on IT departments. Aside from their sheer number, mismanaged roles tend to overlap to a large degree, making them difficult to tell apart and assign correctly.

This lack of clarity undoes many of the benefits that RBAC offers to organizations in the first place: A simple and clearly structured framework for assigning the right access to the right users.

Role sprawls can take many forms, but the two most common scenarios involve either gradual accumulation or starting out with too many roles to begin with.

The problem with role sprawl is that having a huge number of access roles goes against the reason organizations implement role-based access control in the first place: to streamline user and privilege administration.

Instead of assigning privileges directly to each user, RBAC bundles privileges together and allows you to grant all the access a user needs at once. So instead of managing thousands of individual permissions across hundreds of user accounts, you only need to manage a handful of permission roles.

However, when roles grow out of control, suddenly admins are once again forced to manage hundreds of unique objects, only now they are dealing with roles instead of accounts. Role sprawl basically cancels out the benefits of streamlined administration that RBAC normally offers.

When you ask organizations about the biggest challenge in setting up role-based access, many would point to its implementation on a technical level – whether this is achieved through Active Directory groups in an AGDLP structure or a dedicated Identity Governance & Administration solution that supports RBAC across system barriers.

However, while implementing RBAC does take effort and can present unique roadblocks depending on your IT environment, planning out your RBAC deployment can present just as much of a challenge. Using RBAC to its full potential requires a crystal clear understanding of your organizational structure, asset inventory and access needs across different teams. All of which change over time.

The right approach to role & permission design can make or break an RBAC project. For this reason, teams need to plan ahead carefully and must avoid the temptation to rush forward with a half-baked plan. Below, we will discuss the two different philosophies you can take when modeling user access. Spoiler warning: Both have their strengths and weaknesses and both can lead you wrong if you adhere to them dogmatically.

The goal of any access control model is to map user access to their specific job functions, giving your staff all the entitlements they need while taking you as close as possible to Least Privilege Access – which has important benefits to security and compliance.

Role-based access helps organizations implement distinct job roles and functions on a technical level. Your Sales team does not need access to payroll data and your HR team does not need access to customer data. So you create separate roles for these departments and limit access accordingly.

Unfortunately, there are two big problems with optimizing for accuracy in RBAC:

If accurately mapping out access is the first goal of role-based access control, then streamlining privilege administration is the second. RBAC drastically simplifies onboarding, offboarding and any other access changes. This is because updating which roles a user has is a lot faster than tweaking permissions individually.

Accuracy and simplicity may seem like conflicting goals at first, but in practice they are closely connected. When access becomes too complex to manage, accuracy suffers as a result. Admins simply cannot ensure appropriate access if they are struggling to keep up with constant tweaks and changes. Streamlining user and privilege administration gives you a clear picture of what your staff has access to and provides the means to right-size their level of access.

In practice, aiming for simplicity in your RBAC design involves deliberate compromises. You have to decide which sets of users are similar enough to be grouped together, even if this does not capture every nuance of the situation. However, painting with a broad brush in terms of role inclusion leaves you with one of two choices when it comes to setting access levels across a role.

Like most aspects of cybersecurity, role design is a trade-off between security and usability. The decision how broad or how specific to make access roles depends on many factors, including the criticality of the affected systems and the type of data processed through them. Giving your entire design team access to a creative suite carries less risk than giving everyone with the Sales role access to sensitive financial forecasts.

To keep your RBAC implementation running smoothly, it is important to design roles thoughtfully and plan ahead for edge cases – i.e. what do you do when a user does not fit cleanly into your role model or needs an unusual mix of privileges.

The truth is that creating a new role is not always the right answer. Highly specific access needs for small sets of users can be easier to address through individual carve-outs and exceptions. However, knowing where to draw the line can be tricky and having a clear ruleset for how to handle different situations can make all the difference during everyday administration.

Here are three important tips that can help you keep your role structure lean and efficient.

The more user attributes you want to include in your role design, the more roles you are going to need. This is unavoidable. However, organizations can still control whether their rate of growth for new roles is additive or multiplicative.

Instead of creating a unique role for each combination of attributes, create one role for each user attribute and assign multiple roles to each user in order to create the same effect – using additional controls as guardrails to limit role interactions where necessary.

For example, say an organization has three locations (A, B and C) and three job types (X, Y and Z). If you create roles that include both attributes, you end up with a total of nine different combinations: AX, AY, AZ, BX, BY, BZ, CX, CY and CZ. However, if you instead create two types of roles and assign the right two to each user, you end up with only six different roles to manage: A, B, C, X, Y and Z.

The difference may be small in this example, but the more attributes you need to model in your RBAC implementation, the bigger the gap becomes. The only downside is that this approach may not always be feasible depending on technical limitations or organizational requirements.

One of the biggest driving factors in role sprawl is the attempt to deliver on every access requirement through a dedicated role. To avoid this, design simpler roles that provide the baseline access needed across entire groups. More specific privileges required by individual users can then be assigned through other means.

The methods used to build on the foundation provided by RBAC can vary from organization to organization. Smaller teams often rely on emails and spreadsheets to approve access, though it is important to maintain control and effective reporting even outside the RBAC framework. Governance solutions provide appropriate channels to handle exceptions and fringe use cases.

One effective method to handle permissions that fall outside your RBAC framework without overwhelming your IT department is through self-service access requests. Using a dedicated self-service portal, employees can request permissions they need and submit the request directly to the appropriate stakeholder – without the need for phone calls or email chains.

Self-service requests have several major advantages:

However, there is one downside to allowing users to request individual access when they need it: Since these privileges are not a part of your RBAC model, they are not covered by its normal governance processes. For example, users do not lose these individual permissions when their role is changed, as they would with privileges included within that role.

To prevent self-service access from persisting longer than intended, implement periodic access reviews to check whether these privileges are still needed. Like approval workflows, user access reviews work best when handled directly by the system or resource owner. This frees up your IT team and ensures reviews are processed quickly and accurately.

Implementing role-based access does not have to be tricky. With tenfold‘s out-of-the-box integration, no-code setup and role-mining assistant, you can set up RBAC for on-prem Windows systems, Microsoft 365 and third-party app in as little as a few weeks.

But tenfold is far more than just an RBAC tool. As a full-scale Identity Governance platform, tenfold helps you automate role assignments and user lifecycles. It also provides a self-service portal for access requests with smart delegation and easy-to-build workflows, as well as streamlined access reviews.

All the tools you need to go from role-based access to comprehensive governance – fast, efficient and precise. To learn more about how tenfold can help you simplify privilege management and stop roles from growing out of control, book a personal demo with our team today.