Enforcement of U-XACML History-Based Usage Control Policy

2014 6th International Conference on New Technologies Mobility and Security, 2014

Nowadays, accessing communication networks and systems faces multitude applications with large-scale requirements dimensions. Mobility-roaming services in particular-during urgent situations exacerbate the access control issues. Dynamic authorization then is required. However, traditional access control fails to ensure policies to be dynamic. Instead, we propose to externalize the dynamic behavior management of networks and systems through situations. Situations modularize the policy into groups of rules and orient decisions. Our solution limits policy updates and hence authorization inconsistencies. The authorization system is built upon the XACML architecture coupled with a complex eventprocessing engine to handle the concept of situations. Situationoriented attribute based policies are defined statically allowing static verification and validation.

The Computer Journal, 2012

Security requirements deal with the protection of assets against unauthorized access (disclosure or modification) and their availability to authorized users. Temporal constraints of history-based access control policies are difficult to express naturally in traditional policy languages. We propose a compositional formal framework for the specification and verification of temporal access control policies for security critical systems in which history-based policies and other temporal constraints can be expressed. In particular, our framework allows for the specification of policies that can change dynamically in response to time or events enabling dynamic reconfiguration of the access control mechanisms. The framework utilizes a single well-defined formalism, interval temporal logic, for defining the semantics of these policies and to reason about them. We illustrate our approach with a detailed case study of an electronic paper submission system showing the compositional verification of their safety, liveness and information flow properties.

Energies

To boost data spaces and benefit from the great opportunities that they present, data sovereignty must be provided by Distributed Usage Control (DUC). Assuming that DUC will be managed by implementing and enforcing policies, notable efforts have already been undertaken in the context of Access Control (AC) regarding policy analysis due to the impact of low-quality policies on security. In this regard, this paper proposes that policy analysis in the DUC context should be understood as an extension of the AC, which is further affected by other challenging features, chief among which are context-aware control and extended control through action requirements. This paper presents a novel Context-Aware Policy Analysis (CAPA) algorithm for detecting inconsistencies and redundancies for DUC policies by supporting a large set of heterogeneous conditions. In this regard, the dependent relationship of conditions is formulated which will lead to more efficient conflict detection. By implementin...

Proceedings of the 2003 ACM workshop …, 2003

The evolution of distributed computing technologies like grid computing, peer-to-peer computing, pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing, autonomic computing, cloud computing etc. has led to the development of complex virtual systems. These systems enable sharing of resources and services distributed over geographically dispersed, heterogeneous, autonomous administrative domains and allow one to efficiently perform a compute or storage intensive task by harnessing the features available over other domains. The resources and services provided by service providers are generally protected by complex access control policies. These access control policies are expressed using policy specification languages. One of the popular, exhaustive and feature rich access control policy specification language is XACML, which is an OASIS standard also. The XACML policies are specified either manually or using automated XACML policy specification tools. Among major problems that policy administrators face is the problem of conflict policies. Conflict policies can have serious consequences and may lead to unauthorized access. This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a conflict policy detection mechanism that can be used by policy administrators to proactively detect conflict XACML policies present in a policy database. This saves administrators and initiators of job from unnecessary problems arising due to presence of conflicts. The mechanism presented is simple, scalable, efficient and can be used to detect policies conflicting with respect to subject, resource, and action attributes. The mechanism has been evaluated by simulating a distributed policy based authorization and XACML access control system. A number of conflict policies of different nature have been injected in the policy database and conflicts have been identified through proposed XACML conflict policy detection algorithm. The implementation results show that the mechanism efficiently detects conflict policies having conflicts with respect to subject, resource and action attributes. This demonstrates that the approach is workable and can be used to detect conflict policies among a set of XACML policies.

ieeexplore.ieee.org

z.cliffe.schreuders.org

This paper presents a new policy language, known as functionality-based application confinement policy language (FBAC-PL). FBAC-PL takes a unique approach to expressing application-oriented access control policies. Policies for restricting applications are defined in terms of the features applications provide, by means of parameterised and hierarchical policy abstractions known as functionalities. Policies also include metadata for management and the automation of policy specification. The result is a novel scheme for application confinement policy that reuses, encapsulates and abstracts policy details, and facilitates a priori policy specification: that is, without having to rely solely on learning modes for creating policies to restrict applications. This paper presents the policy language, and illustrates its use with examples. A Linux-based implementation, which uses FBAC-PL, has demonstrated that this approach can overcome policy complexity and usability issues of previous schemes.

Proceedings of the 18th ACM symposium on Access control models and technologies - SACMAT '13, 2013

Mobile applications allow individuals on-the-move access to resources "anytime, anywhere" using hand-held mobile devices. We argue that for critical and sensitive resources this is often times not desirable-a lost or stolen mobile device can be tampered with to view or alter sensitive information. We need authorization policies that take into account time of access and location of the user in addition to the credentials of the user. Towards this end, we propose a new spatio-temporal role-based access control model. It improves upon existing models by providing features that are useful for mobile applications. Thus, an application using our model can specify different types of spatio-temporal constraints. We discuss how such an application using our spatio-temporal access control model can be verified using the UPPAAL model checker. We also demonstrate how to reduce the state-space explosion problem that is inherent in model checkers.

2010

The ability to control access to sensitive data in accordance with policy is perhaps the most fundamental security requirement. Despite over four decades of security research, the limited ability for existing access control mechanisms to generically enforce policy persists. While researchers, practitioners and policy makers have specified a large variety of access control policies to address real-world security issues, only a relatively small subset of these policies can be enforced through off-the-shelf technology, and even a smaller subset can be enforced by any one mechanism. In this paper, we propose an access control framework, referred to as the Policy Machine (PM) that fundamentally changes the way policy is expressed and enforced. Employing PM helps in building high assurance enforcement mechanisms in three respects. First, only a relatively small piece of the overall access control mechanism needs to be included in the host system (e.g., an operating system or application)....

Ubiquitous Computing And …, 2008

One of the aspects of autonomic computing is self-protecting where systems are required to consistently enforce security policies in order to allow legitimate actions. The information that comes through the feedback loop after being monitored and analayzed tells the systems what is happening in the environments. The analyzed information describes situation and it is called context. The challenge lies in the question of how the autonomic system protects itself through changes of the situation or context, in other words, how access control policies can be properly written and enforced based on the context. Moreover, when the situation or context changes the policies must also reflect this change. A rudimentary approach is to manually write access control policies for all possible instantiations of the context. This is a cumbersome process and difficult to maintain with a large complex system. This paper focuses on access control policies and addresses these issues by representing context in semantic knowledge and extending a standard access control policy language, XACML, to incorporate the semantic knowledge. The work is validated by a proof of concept implementation.