Formal Specification and Analysis of Security-Critical Norms and Policies - April 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

•  Nirav Ajmeri, Chung-Wei Hang, Simon D. Parsons, and Munindar P. Singh. “Aragorn: Eliciting and Maintaining Secure Service Policies.” IEEE Computer 50(6), June 2017. To appear, pages 1–8.

ACCOMPLISHMENT HIGHLIGHTS

• Based on a review of the attribute-based access control (ABAC) literature, we began developing a normative models that supports representation and reasoning about information sharing in a way that goes beyond ABAC by capturing norms, handling conflicts between them, and producing explanations for authorization decisions.