PoliCon: a policy conciliation framework for heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

It is increasingly important to implement a conflict‐free access control policies for co‐allied networks where different organizations are involve for a common goal. Mobile ad hoc networks are widely used for mission critical situations where teams from different organizational networks cooperate to form a single network to implement their respective operations. These teams (or quads) have different sets of local policies enforced for their own security resulting heterogeneity in access control. Each team wants to preserve its access control policies at a maximum level. Moreover, a set of allied policies govern the cooperation and interaction between the different teams, which may conflict with their local policies. The policy conflicts arise from the transitivity of policy rules, mobility of the nodes, cooperative behaviors, and so on. In addition, the policy rules may be temporal or static. To achieve the successful completion of the mission, it may be required to compromise with the stringency of the enforcement of the conflicting rules for the quads. In this paper, we propose an automated and formal framework to find the optimal conciliation of the policy rules to preserve the mission and thus ensure minimal compromise with the enforcement of policy for each quad. The efficacy of the work lies on optimizing the enforcement of access control policies to achieve the coalition instead of negating the policy. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.