Expressive policy analysis with enhanced system dynamicity

ABSTRACT

Despite several research studies, the effective analysis of policy based systems remains a significant challenge. Policy analysis should at least (i) be expressive (ii) take account of obligations and authorizations, (iii) include a dynamic system model, and (iv) give useful diagnostic information. We present a logic-based policy analysis framework which satisfies these requirements, showing how many significant policy-related properties can be analysed, and we give details of a prototype implementation.

REFERENCES

• 1: Dalal Alrajeh , Oliver Ray , Alessandra Russo , Sebastian Uchitel, Extracting Requirements from Scenarios with ILP, Inductive Logic Programming: 16th International Conference, ILP 2006, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, August 24-27, 2006, Revised Selected Papers, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007 [doi>10.1007/978-3-540-73847-3_14]
• 2: A. Bandara, S. Calo, R. Craven, J. Lobo, E. Lupu, J. Ma, A. Russo, and M. Sloman. An expressive policy analysis framework with enhanced system dynamicity. Technical Report, Department of Computing, Imperial College London, 2008.
• 3: A. K. Bandara, E. C. Lupu, A. Russo, N. Dulay, M. Sloman, P. Flegkas, M. Charalambides, and G. Pavlou. Policy refinement for diffserv quality of service management. In Integrated Network Management, pages 469--482. IEEE, 2005.
• 4: S. Barker. Security policy specification in logic. In Proc. of Int. Conf. on AI, pages 143--148, June 2000.
• 5: M. Y. Becker and S. Nanz. A logic for state-modifying authorization policies. In ESORICS, pages 203--218, 2007.
• 6: M. Y. Becker and S. Nanz. The role of abduction in declarative authorization policies. In P. Hudak and D. S. Warren, editors, PADL, volume 4902 of LNCS, pages 84--99. Springer, 2008.
• 7: Moritz Y. Becker , Peter Sewell, Cassandra: Flexible Trust Management, Applied to Electronic Health Records, Proceedings of the 17th IEEE workshop on Computer Security Foundations, p.139, June 28-30, 2004 [doi>10.1109/CSFW.2004.7]
• 8: D. F. C. Brewer and M. J. Nash. The chinese wall security policy. In IEEE Symposium on S & P, pages 206--214, 1989.
• 9: Glenn Bruns , Daniel S Dantas , Michael Huth, A simple and expressive semantic framework for policy composition in access control, Proceedings of the 2007 ACM workshop on Formal methods in security engineering, p.12-21, November 02-02, 2007, Fairfax, Virginia, USA [doi>10.1145/1314436.1314439]
• 10: Glenn Bruns , Michael Huth, Access-Control Policies via Belnap Logic: Effective and Efficient Composition and Analysis, Proceedings of the 2008 21st IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium, p.163-176, June 23-25, 2008 [doi>10.1109/CSF.2008.10]
• 11: S. Chen, D. Wijesekera, and S. Jajodia. Incorporating dynamic constraints in the flexible authorization framework. In ESORICS, pages 1--16, 2004.
• 12: Jan Chomicki, Efficient checking of temporal integrity constraints using bounded history encoding, ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), v.20 n.2, p.149-186, June 1995 [doi>10.1145/210197.210200]
• 13: Nicodemos Damianou , Naranker Dulay , Emil Lupu , Morris Sloman, The Ponder Policy Specification Language, Proceedings of the International Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks, p.18-38, January 29-31, 2001
• 14: D. J. Dougherty, K. Fisler, and S. Krishnamurthi. Specifying and reasoning about dynamic access-control policies. In U. Furbach and N. Shankar, editors, IJCAR, volume 4130 of LNCS, pages 632--646. Springer, 2006.
• 15: D. J. Dougherty, K. Fisler, and S. Krishnamurthi. Obligations and their interaction with programs. In ESORICS, pages 375--389, 2007.
• 16: D. Ferraiolo and D. Kuhn. Role based access control. In 15th National Computer Security Conference, pages 554--563, 1992.
• 17: Kathi Fisler , Shriram Krishnamurthi , Leo A. Meyerovich , Michael Carl Tschantz, Verification and change-impact analysis of access-control policies, Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering, May 15-21, 2005, St. Louis, MO, USA [doi>10.1145/1062455.1062502]
• 18: M. Gelfond and V. Lifschitz. The stable model semantics for logic programming. In R. Kowalski and K. Bowen, editors, Proc. 5^th International Conference and Symposium on Logic Programming, pages 1070--1080, Seattle, Washington, August 15--19 1988.
• 19: Robert Goldblatt, Logics of time and computation, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford, CA, 1987
• 20: Joseph Y. Halpern , Vicky Weissman, Using First-Order Logic to Reason about Policies, ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC), v.11 n.4, p.1-41, July 2008 [doi>10.1145/1380564.1380569]
• 21: Keith Irwin , Ting Yu , William H. Winsborough, On the modeling and analysis of obligations, Proceedings of the 13th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, October 30-November 03, 2006, Alexandria, Virginia, USA [doi>10.1145/1180405.1180423]
• 22: Sushil Jajodia , Pierangela Samarati , Maria Luisa Sapino , V. S. Subrahmanian, Flexible support for multiple access control policies, ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), v.26 n.2, p.214-260, June 2001 [doi>10.1145/383891.383894]
• 23: Sushil Jajodia , Pierangela Samarati , V. S. Subrahmanian, A Logical Language for Expressing Authorizations, Proceedings of the 1997 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, p.31, May 04-07, 1997
• 24: Sushil Jajodia , Pierangela Samarati , V. S. Subrahmanian , Eliza Bertino, A unified framework for enforcing multiple access control policies, Proceedings of the 1997 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, p.474-485, May 11-15, 1997, Tucson, Arizona, United States
• 25: R Kowalski , M Sergot, A logic-based calculus of events, New Generation Computing, v.4 n.1, p.67-95, 1986 [doi>10.1007/BF03037383]
• 26: Peter Loscocco , Stephen Smalley, Integrating Flexible Support for Security Policies into the Linux Operating System, Proceedings of the FREENIX Track: 2001 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, p.29-42, June 25-30, 2001
• 27: J. McCarthy. Elaboration tolerance. In Proc. Common Sense 98, 1998.
• 28: Rob Miller , Murray Shanahan, Some Alternative Formulations of the Event Calculus, Computational Logic: Logic Programming and Beyond, Essays in Honour of Robert A. Kowalski, Part II, p.452-490, January 2002
• 29: Christos Nomikos , Panos Rondogiannis , Manolis Gergatsoulis, Temporal stratification tests for linear and branching-time deductive databases, Theoretical Computer Science, v.342 n.2-3, p.382-415, 7 September 2005 [doi>10.1016/j.tcs.2005.05.014]
• 30: OASIS XACML TC. extensible access control markup language (XACML) v2.0, 2005.
• 31: Giovanni Russello , Changyu Dong , Naranker Dulay, Authorisation and Conflict Resolution for Hierarchical Domains, Proceedings of the Eighth IEEE International Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks, p.201-210, June 13-15, 2007 [doi>10.1109/POLICY.2007.8]
• 32: Ravi Sandhu , Venkata Bhamidipati , Qamar Munawer, The ARBAC97 model for role-based administration of roles, ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC), v.2 n.1, p.105-135, Feb. 1999 [doi>10.1145/300830.300839]
• 33: Richard Simon , Mary Ellen Zurko, Separation of Duty in Role-based Environments, Proceedings of the 10th IEEE workshop on Computer Security Foundations, p.183, June 10-12, 1997
• 34: B. Van Nuffelen. Abductive constraint logic programming: implementation and applications. PhD thesis, K. U. Leuven, Belgium, June 2004.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.4 System Management

Additional Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.1 Project and People Management

General Terms:
Design, Management

Keywords:
authorization, formal analysis, policies, security