99 research outputs found

    Automated Policy Combination for Secure Data Sharing in Cross-Organizational Collaborations

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    © 2016 IEEE. During business collaborations, multiple participating organizations often need to share data for common interests. In such cases, it is necessary to combine local policies from different organizations into a global one in order to manage access to the shared data. However, local policies of organizations may be different or even conflicting, due to diverse rules and rule combining algorithms chosen. Few existing methods for policy combination are able to automatically combine multiple local policies into a global one. In this paper, we propose a bottom-up approach to address the issues of multiple policy combinations. The key idea is to first classify the rules based on attribute constraints in each policy, and then reduce the rules of the corresponding classes to one with the same attribute constraints. The reduced rules are then combined into a new global policy by choosing the appropriate rule combining algorithm in XACML. The latter ensures compliance with each of the local policies at syntax and semantic levels. To validate our approach, we develop a proof-of-concept implementation of the automated policy combination. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach is highly scalable and supports a number of attribute constraints in each local policy

    An Algebra for Integration and Analysis of Ponder2 Policies

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    Traditional policies often focus on access control requirement and there have been several proposals to define access control policy algebras to handle their compositions. Recently, obligations are increasingly being expressed as part of security policies. However, the compositions and interactions between these two have not yet been studied adequately. In this paper, we propose an algebra capturing both authorization and obligation policies. The algebra consists of two policy constants and six basic operations. It provides language independent mechanisms to manage policies. As a concrete example, we instantiate the algebra for the Ponder2 policy language

    On Completeness in Languages for Attribute-Based Access Control

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    An interoperability framework for security policy languages

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    A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophySecurity policies are widely used across the IT industry in order to secure environments. Firewalls, routers, enterprise application or even operating systems like Windows and Unix are all using security policies to some extent in order to secure certain components. In order to automate enforcement of security policies, security policy languages have been introduced. Security policy languages that are classified as computer software, like many other programming languages have been revolutionised during the last decade. A number of security policy languages have been introduced in the industry in order to tackle a specific business requirements. Not to mention each of these security policy languages themselves evolved and enhanced during the last few years. Having said that, a quick research on security policy languages shows that the industry suffers from the lack of a framework for security policy languages. Such a framework would facilitate the management of security policies from an abstract point. In order to achieve that specific goal, the framework utilises an abstract security policy language that is independent of existing security policy languages yet capable of expressing policies written in those languages. Usage of interoperability framework for security policy languages as described above comes with major benefits that are categorised into two levels: short and long-term benefits. In short-term, industry and in particular multi-dimensional organisations that make use of multiple domains for different purposes would lower their security related costs by managing their security policies that are stretched across their environment and often managed locally. In the long term, usage of abstract security policy language that is independent of any existing security policy languages, gradually paves the way for standardising security policy languages. A goal that seems unreachable at this moment of time. Taking the above facts into account, the aim of this research is to introduce and develop a novel framework for security policy languages. Using such a framework would allow multi-dimensional organisations to use an abstract policy language to orchestrate all security policies from a single point, which could then be propagated across their environment. In addition, using such a framework would help security administrators to learn and use only one single, common abstract language to describe and model their environment(s)

    Multi-Decision Policy and Policy Combinator Specifications

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    Margrave is a specification language and analysis tool for access control policies with semantics based in order-sorted logic. The clear logical roots of Margrave\u27s semantics makes policies specified in the Margrave language both machine analyzable and relatively easy for users to reason about. However, the decision conflict resolution declaration and policy set features of Margrave do not have semantics that are as cleanly rooted in order-sorted logic as Margrave policies and queries are. Additionally, the current semantics of decision conflict resolution declarations and of policy sets do not permit users to take full advantage of the multi-decision capabilities of Margrave policies. The purposes of this thesis are (i) to provide a unified extension to the semantics for policies and policy combination, (ii) to cleanly support decision conflict resolution mechanisms in a general way within those semantics and (iii) to provide insight into the properties of policy combination and decision conflict resolution for multi-decision policies in general. These goals are achieved via the realization that policy combinators may be treated as policies operating within environments extended with the results of the policies to be combined, allowing policy combinators to be defined as if they were policies. The ability to treat policy combinators as policies means that users\u27 current understanding of policies can be easily extended to policy combinators. Additionally, the tools that Margrave has for supporting policies can be leveraged as the Margrave language and analysis tool grow to provide fuller support for policy combination and rule conflict resolution declarations

    10421 Abstracts Collection -- Model-Based Testing in Practice

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    From 17.10. to 22.10.2010, the Dagstuhl Seminar 10421 ``Model-Based Testing in Practice \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

    Automated Certification of Authorisation Policy Resistance

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    Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) extends traditional Access Control by considering an access request as a set of pairs attribute name-value, making it particularly useful in the context of open and distributed systems, where security relevant information can be collected from different sources. However, ABAC enables attribute hiding attacks, allowing an attacker to gain some access by withholding information. In this paper, we first introduce the notion of policy resistance to attribute hiding attacks. We then propose the tool ATRAP (Automatic Term Rewriting for Authorisation Policies), based on the recent formal ABAC language PTaCL, which first automatically searches for resistance counter-examples using Maude, and then automatically searches for an Isabelle proof of resistance. We illustrate our approach with two simple examples of policies and propose an evaluation of ATRAP performances.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, version including proofs of the paper that will be presented at ESORICS 201
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