Visible to the public Formal Specification and Analysis of Security-Critical Norms and Policies - July 2017Conflict Detection Enabled

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

ACCOMPLISHMENT HIGHLIGHTS

  • We studied a variety of common languages for access control policies, as traditionally adopted in policy research and practice, and possible ways of expressing these policies in first order and other logics.  A systematic formalization is necessary to provide effective support for policy administration to determine how policies apply in disparate usage contexts and how the policies relate to one another. This exercise indicates  shortcomings  of traditional approaches in terms of generality and support for automated reasoning.