Visible to the public Scientific Understanding of Policy Complexity

Submitted by aehunt on Fri, 06/27/2014 - 5:28pm

Public Audience
Purpose: To highlight project progress. Information is generally at a higher level which is accessible to the interested public. All information contained in the report (regions 1-3) is a Government Deliverable/CDRL.

PI(s):  Ninghui Li, Robert Proctor, Ting Yu
Researchers: 

 

HARD PROBLEM(S) ADDRESSED

  • Policy-Governed Secure Collaboration -  Security policies can be very complex.  The same policy can also be expressed in ways of different complexity.  It is desirable to have a scientific understanding of measuring how complex a policy and a policy encoding is.  
  • Human Behavior - Our policy complexity is based on how easy for humans to understand and write policies.  There is thus a human behavior aspect to it. 

 

PUBLICATIONS
Report papers written as a results of this research. If accepted by or submitted to a journal, which journal. If presented at a conference, which conference.

None so far.

ACCOMPLISHMENT HIGHLIGHTS

  • We have conducted a survey of complexity measures for access control policies.  
  • We have identified identified two ideas for measuring policy complexity, one basing on the number of basic units of a policy (which can be roughly viewed as the number of clauses when expressing a policy in conjunctive normal form), and the other basing on expressing a policy in a language of nested exceptions.  
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