Formal Specification and Analysis of Security-Critical Norms and Policies - January 2017

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:  Nirav Ajmeri, Jiaming Jiang, 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

• Ozgur Kafali, Nirav Ajmeri, and Munindar P. Singh. Kont: Computing Tradeoffs in Normative Multiagent Systems. Proceedings of the 31st Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2017.

ACCOMPLISHMENT HIGHLIGHTS

• We identified the challenges and solutions in representing and reasoning about conflicting norms, especially in realistic settings where the norms may be more or less preferred than other norms and the preferences among norms depend not only upon the situation but also upon additional high-level norms.
• We formulated an approach for representing specifications of sociotechnical systems (STSs) based on norms. This representation supports comparing STS specifications with respect to stakeholder requirements, especially as classified into safety and liveness requirements.