Security policy foundations in context UNITY

Abstract

Security certification includes assessing an information system to verify its compliance with diverse, pre-selected security controls. The goal of certification is to identify where controls are implemented correctly and where they are violated, creating potential vulnerability risks. Certification complexity is magnified in software composed of systems of systems where there are limited formal methodologies to express management policies, given a set of security control properties, and verify them against the interaction of the participating components and their individual security policy implementations. In this paper, we extend Context UNITY, a formal, distributed, and context aware coordination language to support policy controls. The new language features enforce security controls and provide a means to declare policy specifics in a manner similar to declaring variable types. We use these features in a specification to show how verifying system compliance with selected security controls, such as those found in the NIST SP800-53 document, can be accomplished.

A Design and Verification Framework for Service Composition in the Cloud

“…Coordination languages have been successfully used to formally verify operational correctness [18,19] and security properties over static SOA specifications [19][20][21]. The primary coordination language construct is a tuple space.…”

“…The primary coordination language construct is a tuple space. Tuple spaces are a well-studied data structure [20][21][22][23] that provides a data-driven model of component interactions. Its usage originated with the parallel programming language Linda [23], which provided the three operators in, out, and rd to allow tuples to be respectively entered, removed, or read from the tuple space.…”

“…X-UNITY [21,25], pronounce "cross-unity". offers all of the fine-grained access control and encryption capabilities of SecSpaces, but also brings to bear a powerful temporal proof logic associated with its predecessors [18,26].…”

“…X-UNITY provides support for representing local and global security policy awareness related to access control, encryption, and auditing of exposed (shared) variables in the tuple space [21]. Fig.…”

“…1 [21]. The policy section may contain the keywords access, encrypt, and audit to dictate the policy implementation conditions, such as policy <exposed variable> access|audit|encrypt <params>, which ensures that certain exposed variables meet the policy parameters defined when the program is deployed.…”