Cassandra: flexible trust management, applied to electronic health records

Abstract

We study the specification of access control policy in large-scale distributed systems. We present Cassandra, a language and system for expressing policy, and the results of a substantial case study, a security policy for a national electronic health record system, based on the requirements for the ongoing UK National Health Service procurement exercise. Cassandra policies are expressed in a language based on Datalog with constraints. The expressiveness of the language (and its computational complexity) can be tuned by choosing an appropriate constraint domain. Cassandra is role-based; it supports credential-based access control (e.g. between administrative domains); and rules can refer to remote policies (for automatic credential retrieval and trust negotiation). Moreover, the policy language is small, and it has a formal semantics for query evaluation and for the access control engine. For the case study we choose a constraint domain C/sub 0/ that is sufficiently expressive to encode many policy idioms. The case study turns out to require many subtle variants of these; it is important to express this variety smoothly, rather than add them as ad hoc features. By ensuring only a constraint compact fragment of C/sub 0/ is used, we guarantee a finite and computable fixed-point model. We use a top-down evaluation algorithm, for efficiency and to guarantee termination. The case study (with some 310 rules and 58 roles) demonstrates that this language is expressive enough for a real-world application; preliminary results suggest that the performance should be acceptable.