Formal Specification and Analysis of Security-Critical Norms and Policies - October 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 Y. Chirkova, Jon Doyle, Munindar P. Singh
Researchers:  Bennett Y. Narron, Nirav Ajmeri, Ozgur Kafali

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.

ACCOMPLISHMENT HIGHLIGHTS

• We have developed a framework, called Vitesse, for representing and reasoning about conflicts and dominance between conditional, directed norms. Vitesse allows that a norm be violated as long as it is dominated by a norm that is satisfied. Vitesse tackles important use cases, e.g., in healthcare, wherein which norms dominate others depends upon the situation. It adapts answer-set programming to compute sets of norms with respect to which it assesses agent compliance.
• We developed another framework called NoReST that supports capturing normative requirements for sociotechnical systems along with a lifecycle for the elementary norms; a model checker for determining if a model constructed from norms satisfies specifications expressed in temporal logic; a set of normative design patterns through which to specify a revised sociotechnical system.