Aragorn: Eliciting and Maintaining Secure Service Policies

Services today are configured through policies that capture expected behaviors. However, because of subtle and changing stakeholder requirements, producing and maintaining policies is nontrivial. Policy errors are surprisingly common and cause avoidable security vulnerabilities.

We propose Aragorn, an approach that applies formal argumentation to produce policies that balance stakeholder concerns. We demonstrate empirically that, compared to the traditional approach for specifying policies, Aragorn performs (1) better on coverage, correctness, and quality; (2) equally well on learnability and effort/coverage and difficulty; and (3) slightly worse on time and effort needed. Thus, Aragorn demonstrates the potential for capturing policy rationales as arguments.