OASIS announced that its members have approved the Extensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) version 2.0 as an OASIS Standard. Approval by OASIS signifies the highest level of ratification. XACML is used to represent and evaluate access control policies.

Dan Blum, senior vice president and research director of the Burton Group, noted, "Access control is a requirement of almost every application. XACML goes beyond simply denying or granting information access, it defines the mechanism for creating the rules and policy sets that enable meaningful authorization decisions."

To meet the needs of a wide range of users across many different environments, XACML 2.0 incorporates new profiles for Role Based Access Control (RBAC), Privacy, and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). XACML 2.0 profiles also provide integration and hierarchical resources for the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) OASIS Standard.

"XACML is designed to standardize the use of declarative policy to control access to resources, which can reduce costs while increasing security," said Hal Lockhart, co-chair of the OASIS XACML technical committee. "XACML 2.0 can be of particular interest to those deploying SAML, looking for a practical way to implement RBAC or protecting hierarchical resources, such as portions of XML documents."

Before becoming an OASIS Standard, XACML v2.0 first completed an extensive public review and was approved by the OASIS XACML Technical Committee. Then, the specification demonstrated its readiness through multiple implementations, after which XACML was reviewed and approved by the OASIS membership as a whole.

"The approval of XACML 2.0 as an OASIS Standard builds on a solid base of XACML implementations by major international companies, start-ups, and open source providers," noted Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS. "Increasingly, XACML is being recognized as an integral part of enterprise security frameworks. Our congratulations go to the members of the OASIS XACML Technical Committee for their hard work in advancing this standard."

XACML is part of the growing portfolio of OASIS Standards for security, which also includes the Application Vulnerability Description Language (AVDL), SAML, Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML), WS-Security, and XML Common Biometric Format (XCBF). XACML v2.0 was developed by members of the OASIS XACML Technical Committee, which includes representatives of BEA Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, Computer Associates, Entrust, Gluecode Software, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and others.