Binder, a Logic-Based Security Language

ABSTRACT

We introduce the concept of a security language, used to expresssecurity statements in a distributed system. Most existing securitylanguages encode security statements as schematized data structures,such as ACLs and X.509 certificates. In contrast, Binder is an openlogic-based security language that encodes security statements ascomponents of communicating distributed logic programs. Binder programscan be more expressive than statements in standard security languages,and the meanings of standard security constructs and operations such ascertificates and delegation are simplified and clarified by theirformulation in Binder. Translation into Binder has been used to explorethe design of other new and existing security languages.