Administration in a multiple policy/domain environment: the administration and melding of disparate policies

Abstract

New standards for trusted systems propose multiple security policies and multiple policy domains. My experience building a Mutipolicy Machine prototype illustrated that multiple policy domains and complex policies push current policy administration techniques, tools, and user interfaces beyond their limits. This paper proposes a holistic approach to policy administration consisting of human-intuitive user interfaces for defining policies, a PolicyBase (a term I am introducing to describe a KnowledgeBase focused on the rules and data required to describe the policies to be administered and acted on) for storing them, and intelligent tool programs that allow the administrator to anticipate the impact of policy changes and interactions.