Visible to the public Formal Specification and Analysis of Security-Critical Norms and Policies - January 2015

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):  Rada Chirkova, Jon Doyle, Munindar Singh
Researchers:  Bennett Y. Narron, Vaira Selvakani, Nirav Ajmeri

HARD PROBLEM(S) ADDRESSED

  • Policy-Governed Secure Collaboration - This project addresses how to specify and analyze norms (standards of correct collaborative behavior) and policies (ways of achieving different collaborative behaviors) to determine important properties, such as their mutual consistency.
  • Scalability and Composability - This project can facilitate the composition of new collaborative systems by combining sets of norms and policies, and verifying whether such combinations satisfy desired properties.

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.

Amit K. Chopra and Munindar P. Singh, Cupid: Commitments in Relational Algebra, Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Austin, Texas, January 2015, AAAI Press, pages 1-8. Accepted; to appear.

ACCOMPLISHMENT HIGHLIGHTS

  • We have developed two detailed examples that focus on security features, and have written their description in a semi-formal notation that uses the notions of resources (to be protected), players' goals and actions to achieve those goals, as well as norms, policies, and preferences that apply to the resources and actions.
  • We have developed a formal language for commitments (as a variety of directed norms that we study in this task) that incorporates time along with a formal semantics that maps this language to the relational algebra over event relations. This approach will enable storing and querying the normative state of a system of two or more interacting parties.