Access Control Policy Language Research Articles

A certified access control policy language: TEpla

A certified access control policy language: TEpla

Trilattice-Based Access Control Models: How to Secure Current Computer Network Mikhail

Designing security, from the hardware level, is essential to ensure the integrity of the intelligent cyberphysical infrastructure that is the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). If intelligent cyber-physical infrastructure fails to do the right things because it is insecure and vulnerable, then there will be negative social consequences [1]. Security is, in a sense, the access control to IIoT systems, which increasingly relies on the ability to compose different policies. Therefore, the advantage in any framework for compiling policies is that it is intuitive, formal, expressive, application-independent, as well as expandable to create domain-specific instances. Recently, such a scheme was proposed based on Belnap logic FOUR2 [2]. Four values of the Belnap bilattice have been interpreted as grant, deny, conflict, or unspecified with respect to access-control policy. Belnap's four-valued logic has found a variety of applications in various fields, such as deductive database theory, distributed logic programming, and other areas. However, it turns out that the truth order in FOUR2 is a truth-and-falsity order at the same time [3]. The smallest lattice, where the orders of truth and falsity are independent of each other, which is especially important for security policy, is that of Shramko-Wansing’s SIXTEEN3. This generalization is well-motivated and leads from the bilattice FOUR2 with an information and a truth-and-falsity ordering to another algebraic structure, namely the trilattice SIXTEEN3 with an information ordering together with a truth ordering and a (distinct) falsity ordering. Based on SIXTEEN3 and new Boolean predicates to control access [4], we define an expressive access-control policy language, having composition statements based on the statements of Schramko-Wansing’s logic. Natural orderings on politics are obtained by independent lifting the orders of truth and falsity of trilattice, which results in a query language in which conflict freedom analysis can be developed. The reduction of formal verification of queries to that on predicates over access requests enables to carry out policy analysis. We evaluate our approach through examples of control access model policy.

Research on multicloud access control policy integration framework

Multicloud access control is important for resource sharing and security interoperability across different clouds, and heterogeneity of access control policy is an important challenge for cloud mashups. XAC-ML is widely used in distributed environment as a declaratively fine-grained, attribute-based access control policy language, but the policy integration of XACML lacks formal description and theory foundation. Multicloud Access Control Policy Integration Framework (MACPIF) is proposed in the paper, which consists of Attribute-based Policy Evaluation Model (ABPEM), Four-value Logic with Completeness (FLC) and Four-value Logic based Policy Integration Operators (FLPIOs). ABPEM evaluates access control policy and extends XACML decision to four-value. According to policy decision set and policy integration characteristics, we construct FLC and define FLPIOs including Intersection, Union, Difference, Implication and Equivalence. We prove that MACPIF can achieve policy monotonicity, functional completeness, canonical suitability and canonical completeness. Analysis results show that this framework can meet the requirements of policy integration in Multicloud.

Trilattice-Based Access Control Models: How to Secure Current Computer Network

Designing security, from the hardware level, is essential to ensure the integrity of the intelligent cyber-physical infrastructure that is the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). If intelligent cyber-physical infrastructure fails to do the right things because it is insecure and vulnerable, then there will be negative social consequences [1]. Security is, in a sense, the access control to IIoT systems, which increasingly relies on the ability to compose different policies. Therefore, the advantage in any framework for compiling policies is that it is intuitive, formal, expressive, application-independent, as well as expandable to create domain-specific instances. Recently, such a scheme was proposed based on Belnap logic FOUR2 [2]. Four values of the Belnap bilattice have been interpreted as grant, deny, conflict, or unspecified with respect to access-control policy. Belnap’s four-valued logic has found a variety of applications in various fields, such as deductive database theory, distributed logic programming, and other areas. However, it turns out that the truth order in FOUR2 is a truth-and-falsity order at the same time [3]. The smallest lattice, where the orders of truth and falsity are independent of each other, which is especially important for security policy, is that of Shramko-Wansing’s SIXTEEN3. This generalization is well-motivated and leads from the bilattice FOUR2 with an information and a truth-and-falsity ordering to another algebraic structure, namely the trilattice SIXTEEN3 with an information ordering together with a truth ordering and a (distinct) falsity ordering.Based onSIXTEEN3 and new Boolean predicates to control access [4], we define an expressive access-control policy language, having composition statements based on the statements of Schramko-Wansing’s logic. Natural orderings on politics are obtained by independent lifting the orders of truth and falsity of trilattice, which results in a query language in which conflict freedom analysis can be developed. The reduction of formal verification of queries to that on predicates over access requests enables to carry out policy analysis. We evaluate our approach through examples of control access model policy.

Establishment of attribute bitmaps for efficient XACML policy evaluation

One of the primary challenges to apply the access control policy language XACML is the performance problem of the policy decision point (PDP), particularly when the PDP experience a great number of policies. The research on improving the PDP evaluation performance is of great significance. By combining with automaton theory an efficient policy decision engine is constructed in this paper, and attribute bitmaps are established statically for each subject, resource and action attribute of policies loaded by the policy decision engine. In evaluating access requests, the policy decision engine dynamically analyzes the requests and extracts the required attribute bitmaps to enforce the AND operation. According to the result of the AND operation, the policy decision engine matches the policies rapidly and gives out an authorization decision. The time that the policy decision engine takes to complete the evaluation of one access request is within 0.5 microsecond. This method not only greatly saves the storage space of policies, but also significantly reduces the time that the PDP takes to match the policies and evaluate access requests. Comparisons of the evaluation time taken by the policy decision engine with that taken by the Sun PDP, as well as XEngine and SBA-XACML, are made under different numbers of access requests. Experimental results show that the evaluation performance of the policy decision engine has a great improvement over that of the Sun PDP, XEngine and SBA-XACML.

Access control and the Resource Description Framework: A survey

In recent years we have seen significant advances in the technology used to both publish and consume structured data using the existing web infrastructure, commonly referred to as the Linked Data Web. However, in order to support the next generation of e-business applications on top of Linked Data suitable forms of access control need to be put in place. This paper provides an overview of the various access control models, standards and policy languages, and the different access control enforcement strategies for the Resource Description Framework (the data model underpinning the Linked Data Web). A set of access control requirements that can be used to categorise existing access control strategies is proposed and a number of challenges that still need to be overcome are identified.

A Provenance-Aware Access Control Framework with Typed Provenance

Provenance is a directed graph that captures historical information about data items in Provenance-Aware Systems (PAS). A variety of access control models and policy languages specific to PAS have been recently discussed in literature. However, it is still not clear how to efficiently specify provenance-aware access control policies and how to effectively enforce these policies with respect to complex provenance graph that can only be captured at run-time. To this end, we design and implement a provenance-aware access control framework with a layered architecture that features an abstract layer, including a Typed Provenance Model (TPM) and a set of TPM interpreters. TPM includes a set of abstract provenance types enabling efficient specification of provenance-aware policies. New provenance types can be composed of extant ones for specifying new policies. TPM interpreters can be integrated to enable the policy enforcement with respect to provenance graphs in different physical representations. By treating provenance types as special attributes, the proposed framework enables an adoption of provenance-aware access control in existing attribute-based access control frameworks, such as XACML-compliant ones. We implement the proposed framework by extending SUN's XACML implementation and show that it facilitates the specification of provenance-aware policies in XACML with minor extensions. We also analyze the performance of the proposed framework.

An integrated framework for securing semi-structured health records

In the last years, the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have been widely promoted, with the final aim of improving care quality and patient safety. Yet, sharing patient data in a large distributed and heterogeneous context, such as the healthcare domain, has inherently introduced security and privacy risks, due to the great sensitivity and confidentiality of the patient data and the need of accessing such data by a large number of health care workers with various roles for the patient care. Even though various techniques have been developed to effectively implement fine-grained access control, which allows flexibility in specifying differential access rights of individual users, some unsolved problems can be pointed out with respect to the specification of complex policies over EHRs: (i) the difficulty of forcing narrative text to assume a semi-structured coded form into EHRs in order to build access control policies also working at a section-level; (ii) an overly high-level of theoretical ability required to practically use access control models and policy languages as a whole, due to a scarce integration among them; and (iii) the lack of tools for easily editing and upgrading access control policies over EHRs. In order to face all these open issues, this paper proposes a hybrid framework aimed at enabling and supporting the definition of fine-grained access control policies working on semi-structured EHRs. The key issues of the framework are: (i) a semantic-based method that hybridizes linguistic and statistical techniques in order to give a semi-structured form to a narrative text to be inserted into EHRs, by identifying its specific sections; (ii) a formal role-based authorization model, encoded as a couple of ontologies, to regulate the access to these semi-structured EHRs with respect to their sections; and (iii) a procedural policy language and a set of patterns to simply encode and update access control restrictions in the form of “if–then rules” built on the top of the ontological model formalized. A prototype implementation of this framework is realized in the form of a system offering simple and intuitive interfaces to the security administrators. Finally, an experimental evaluation over real documents contained into EHRs, i.e. discharge summaries, is described, showing the feasibility of the proposed framework and suggesting that its application could simply and proficiently secure the access to healthcare information contained into semi-structured EHRs and, thus, face security and privacy risks in real healthcare scenarios.

Secure Data Sharing and Processing in Heterogeneous Clouds

Abstract The extensive cloud adoption among the European Public Sector Players empowered them to own and operate a range of cloud infrastructures. These deployments vary both in the size and capabilities, as well as in the range of employed technologies and processes. The public sector, however, lacks the necessary technology to enable effective, interoperable and secure integration of a multitude of its computing clouds and services. In this work we focus on the federation of private clouds and the approaches that enable secure data sharing and processing among the collaborating infrastructures and services of public entities. We investigate the aspects of access control, data and security policy languages, as well as cryptographic approaches that enable fine-grained security and data processing in semi-trusted environments. We identify the main challenges and frame the future work that serve as an enabler of interoperability among heterogeneous infrastructures and services. Our goal is to enable both security and legal conformance as well as to facilitate transparency, privacy and effectivity of private cloud federations for the public sector needs.

Decision Diagrams for XACML Policy Evaluation and Management

One of the primary challenges to apply the XACML access control policy language in applications is the performance problem of policy evaluation engines, particularly when they experience a great number of policies. Some existing works attempted to solve this problem, but only for some particular use-cases: either supporting simple policies with equality comparisons or predefined attribute values. Due to the lack of carefully checking the XACML model, they did not have original policy evaluation semantics. Therefore, they cannot handle errors containing indeterminate decisions, or ignore the critical attribute setting that leads to potential missing attribute attacks. In this paper, we build up the XACML logical model and propose a decision diagram approach using the data interval partition aggregation. It can parse and transform complex logical expressions in policies into decision tree structures, which efficiently improve the policy evaluation performance. Our approach can also be applied to solve other policy management problems such as policy redundancy detection, policy testings and comparisons, or authorization reverse queries.

Abductive Analysis of Administrative Policies in Rule-Based Access Control

In large organizations, access control policies are managed by multiple users (administrators). An administrative policy specifies how each user in an enterprise may change the policy. Fully understanding the consequences of an administrative policy in an enterprise system can be difficult, because of the scale and complexity of the access control policy and the administrative policy, and because sequences of changes by different users may interact in unexpected ways. Administrative policy analysis helps by answering questions such as user-permission reachability, which asks whether specified users can together change the policy in a way that achieves a specified goal, namely, granting a specified permission to a specified user. This paper presents a rule-based access control policy language, a rule-based administrative policy model that controls addition and removal of facts and rules, and an abductive analysis algorithm for user-permission reachability. Abductive analysis means that the algorithm can analyze policy rules even if the facts initially in the policy (e.g., information about users) are unavailable. The algorithm does this by computing minimal sets of facts that, if present in the initial policy, imply reachability of the goal.

SoNeUCONABC, an expressive usage control model for Web-Based Social Networks

In the era of hyper-connectivity Web-Based Social Networks (WBSNs) are demanding applications. They facilitate the interaction of huge amounts of users and the development of appropriate Access Control Models (ACMs) is an arising necessity. Particularly, the development of WBSNs ACMs with expressive power and capable of managing access control along the whole usage process is the challenge pursued. To contribute on this issue, first, 23 proposals have been analysed and second, SoNeUCONABC, an expressive usage control model for WBSNs, is proposed. It extends UCONABC (Park, 2003) including relationships management and it is formally defined, specifying entities and elements involved and an access control policy language. Moreover, policy construction is carefully detailed by using regular expressions and access control enforcement functions are described. Finally, the evaluation shows, theoretically, the significant expressive power of SoNeUCONABC and, empirically, the feasibility of its implementation by the development of a proof of concept system.

Design and Implementation of a CIM-SPL Based RBAC Policy Language

Since the original CIM-SPL policy language does not support access control policy, the CIM-SPL is extended with the RBAC model in this paper. Then a new CIM-SPL based RBAC policy language is designed and implemented. The syntax specification of the new policy language complies with the original CIM-SPL. So it is quite suitable to describe access control policies for information systems specified by CIM. The implementation framework of the new access control policy language is based on the IETF PDP/PEP approach and is integrated in the Open Pegasus system which is the most widely used open-source software of CIM implementation. At last, a case study of Health Information System is used to demonstrate the flexibility and applicability of the new access control policy language.

Access control via belnap logic

Access control to IT systems increasingly relies on the ability to compose policies. Hence there is benefit in any framework for policy composition that is intuitive, formal (and so “analyzable” and “implementable”), expressive, independent of specific application domains, and yet able to be extended to create domain-specific instances. Here we develop such a framework based on Belnap logic. An access-control policy is interpreted as a four-valued predicate that maps access requests to either grant , deny , conflict , or unspecified -- the four values of the Belnap bilattice. We define an expressive access-control policy language PBel, having composition operators based on the operators of Belnap logic. Natural orderings on policies are obtained by lifting the truth and information orderings of the Belnap bilattice. These orderings lead to a query language in which policy analyses, for example, conflict freedom, can be specified. Policy analysis is supported through a reduction of the validity of policy queries to the validity of propositional formulas on predicates over access requests. We evaluate our approach through firewall policy and RBAC policy examples, and discuss domain-specific and generic extensions of our policy language.

A Semantics Based Approach for Cross Domain Access Control

With the development of cloud computing, the mutual understandability among distributed Access Control Policies (ACPs) and attribute of entities has become an important issue in the security field of open distributed environment. Semantic Web technology provides the solution to semantic interoperability of heterogeneous applications. In this paper, we analysis existing access control approaches and present a new Semantics Based Cross Domain Access Control Approach with Semantic Access Control Policy Language (SACPL) for describing ACPs. Semantic access control architecture is designed to embed SACPL language and Access Control Oriented Ontology System (ACOOS) into the access control process. Using the approach presented, access control across different domains can be effectively solved through the description and management of semantic attribute. This study enriches the research that the semantic web technology is applied in the field of security, and provides a new way of thinking of access control in cloud computing.

Knowledge sharing in virtual enterprises via an ontology-based access control approach

Collaborating throughout a product life cycle via virtual enterprise (VE) is one of the most promising strategies for enhancing global competitiveness. Efficient and secure knowledge sharing is critical to the success of a VE. This study presents a novel approach, model and technology for knowledge access control and sharing across enterprises. First, this study proposes an ontology-based knowledge sharing model and a multiple-layer knowledge representation framework on which a knowledge access control model for knowledge sharing in a VE is proposed. In the proposed model, user authorizations permitting access to knowledge in a VE are classified into two levels: (1) basic privileges and (2) extended privileges. The former is evaluated from four dimensions, i.e. who, what, when and where, while the latter is determined by considering how three domain ontologies, i.e., product, organization and activity, are related. This study then develops a knowledge access control policy (KACP) language model which is used to identify the knowledge access control and sharing rules of a VE and all its enterprise members. The knowledge access control model proposed in this study can facilitate VE Knowledge management and sharing across enterprises, enhance knowledge sharing security and flexibility and regulate knowledge sharing to expeditiously reflect changes in the business environment.