Design and Implementation of a Generic Framework for Rule-based Automated User Role Management

Many systems that host groups of users, like social media platforms, provide solutions or tools for users and groups of users. Within these groups, there can exist roles, which again might be connected to permissions. The role model itself can vary from system to system. Some are hierarchical, some have flat hierarchies, some are related to the permissions, others with notifications. Decoupling the role model implementation from the rest of the system has multiple advantages, such as achieving automatic role assignment more easily and being able to change a role model on the fly. Within this master thesis, challenges of automated role assignment are examined and necessary elements for how a development tool can help are distilled. The main contribution is the tool karmantra, which allows to integrate arbitrary role models in software projects and lets developers extend or alter them. The tool is kept in a very generic way to be expandable easily. With this tool, a step is taken towards decoupled and transparent role systems, that can not only serve the needs of common commercial platform needs.