Semiautomated Verification of Access Control Implementation in Industrial Networked Systems

Abstract

Access control is a necessary building block in the security of any kind of cyber system and, in this sense, industrial networked systems (INSs) make no exception. Typically, access control policies are specified at a high implementation-independent level of abstraction and then mapped onto the real system by leveraging available policy enforcement mechanisms. Unfortunately, different from general-purpose ICT systems, enforcement mechanisms are generally very basic in INS. As a consequence, verifying the correctness of policy implementation becomes a crucial task, especially cumbersome when it needs to be carried out entirely by hand. This paper presents a new methodology, which also serves as the basis of a purposely developed software tool conceived to cope with the lack of policy enforcement mechanisms in INS and to allow semiautomatic verification of policy implementation. Our approach is based on a twofold system model that enables both the abstract specification of access control policies and the detailed description of the target physical system. These two separate views are then combined to automatically determine whether the current system implementation matches the policy specification.