AAL and Static Conflict Detection in Policy

Abstract

International audienceSecurity and privacy requirements in ubiquitous systems need a sophisticated policy language with features to express access restrictions and obligations. Ubiquitous systems involve multiple actors owning sensitive data concerning aspects such as location, discrete and continuous time, multiple roles that can be shared among actors or evolve over time. Policy consistency is an important problem in languages supporting these aspects. In this paper we present an abstract language (AAL) to specify most of these security and privacy features and compare it with XACML. We also classified the existing conflict detection mechanisms for XACML in dynamic, testing, or static detection. A thorough analysis of these mechanisms reveals that they have several weaknesses and they are not applicable in our context. We advocate for a classic approach using the notion of logical consistency to detect conflicts in AAL

Efficiently Characterizing the Undefined Requests of a Rule-Based System

“…As we can see this property assumes that the input system is satisfiable, and it is different from many approaches looking for logical inconsistencies in a system, for instance [9,10,20].…”

“…We describe here the case of the CONTINUE A policy already used in [27,20] and dedicated to conference management. This policy 5 is specified in 25 XACML files containing 44 rules.…”

“…[7,8,19,16]. A few studies rely on checking satisfiability as in [20], but it is too weak since satisfiability is always a system requirement. Other formal methods and verification, for instance [9,10,11,12], use manual proof or derivation tools and are able to prove expected properties of the system (e.g., an access is never both permitted and denied).…”

Attribute-Based Policy Evaluation Using Constraints Specification Language and Conflict Detections

“…Taking the ABAC policy specified by the XACML [11] as an example, there exist conflict problems among the rules. Several concepts such as attribute expression, policy rule, access request, and conflict are taken into account in this study, which are described as follows:…”

“…erefore, how to detect the conflicts among policies has become an urgent problem to be resolved. Royer and De Oliveira [11] separated the existing conflict detection mechanisms for the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) into three different types. e dynamic and testing detections depend on access requests, while the static detection was based on the rule set without generating requests.…”