Towards defining semantic foundations for purpose-based privacy policies

We define a semantic model for purpose, based on which purpose-based privacy policies can be meaningfully expressed and enforced in a business system. The model is based on the intuition that the purpose of an action is determined by its situation among other inter-related actions. Actions and their relationships can be modeled in the form of an action graph which is based on the business processes in a system. Accordingly, a modal logic and the corresponding model checking algorithm are developed for formal expression of purpose-based policies and verifying whether a particular system complies with them. It is also shown through various examples, how various typical purpose-based policies as well as some new policy types can be expressed and checked using our model

A modal logic for reasoning on consistency and completeness of regulations

In this paper, we deal with regulations that may exist in multi-agent systems in order to regulate agent behaviour and we discuss two properties of regulations, that is consistency and completeness. After defining what consistency and completeness mean, we propose a way to consistently complete incomplete regulations. In this contribution, we extend previous works and we consider that regulations are expressed in a first order modal deontic logic

How to Complete Regulations in Multi-agent Systems

In this paper, we deal with regulations that may exist in multiagent systems in order to regulate agent behaviour. More precisely, we discuss two properties of regulations, consistency and ompleteness. After defining what consistency and completeness mean, we propose a way to consistently complete incomplete regulations. This contribution considers that regulations are expressed in a first order deontic logic. We will focus on particular regulations: information exchange policies

Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Belief Semantics of Authorization Logic

Authorization logics have been used in the theory of computer security to reason about access control decisions. In this work, a formal belief semantics for authorization logics is given. The belief semantics is proved to subsume a standard Kripke semantics. The belief semantics yields a direct representation of principals' beliefs, without resorting to the technical machinery used in Kripke semantics. A proof system is given for the logic; that system is proved sound with respect to the belief and Kripke semantics. The soundness proof for the belief semantics, and for a variant of the Kripke semantics, is mechanized in Coq

Portunes: analyzing multi-domain insider threats

The insider threat is an important problem in securing information systems. Skilful insiders use attack vectors that yield the greatest chance of success, and thus do not limit themselves to a restricted set of attacks. They may use access rights to the facility where the system of interest resides, as well as existing relationships with employees. To secure a system, security professionals should therefore consider attacks that include non-digital aspects such as key sharing or exploiting trust relationships among employees. In this paper, we present Portunes, a framework for security design and audit, which incorporates three security domains: (1) the security of the computer system itself (the digital domain), (2) the security of the location where the system is deployed (the physical domain) and (3) the security awareness of the employees that use the system (the social domain). The framework consists of a model, a formal language and a logic. It allows security professionals to formally model elements from the three domains in a single framework, and to analyze possible attack scenarios. The logic enables formal specification of the attack scenarios in terms of state and transition properties

Modalities, Cohesion, and Information Flow

It is informally understood that the purpose of modal type constructors in programming calculi is to control the flow of information between types. In order to lend rigorous support to this idea, we study the category of classified sets, a variant of a denotational semantics for information flow proposed by Abadi et al. We use classified sets to prove multiple noninterference theorems for modalities of a monadic and comonadic flavour. The common machinery behind our theorems stems from the the fact that classified sets are a (weak) model of Lawvere's theory of axiomatic cohesion. In the process, we show how cohesion can be used for reasoning about multi-modal settings. This leads to the conclusion that cohesion is a particularly useful setting for the study of both information flow, but also modalities in type theory and programming languages at large