Formal specification and validation of security policies

  • Authors:
  • Tony Bourdier;Horatiu Cirstea;Mathieu Jaume;Hélène Kirchner

  • Affiliations:
  • INRIA Nancy - Grand-Est Research Center & Nancy-Université & LORIA, France;INRIA Nancy - Grand-Est Research Center & Nancy-Université & LORIA, France;SPI LIP6, Université Paris 6, France;INRIA Bordeaux - Sud-Ouest Research Center, France

  • Venue:
  • FPS'11 Proceedings of the 4th Canada-France MITACS conference on Foundations and Practice of Security
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We propose a formal framework for the specification and validation of security policies. To model a secured system, the evolution of security information in the system is described by transitions triggered by authorization requests and the policy is given by a set of rules describing the way the corresponding decisions are taken. Policy rules are constrained rewrite rules whose constraints are first-order formulas on finite domains, which provides enhanced expressive power compared to classical security policy specification approaches like the ones using Datalog, for example. Our specifications have an operational semantics based on transition and rewriting systems and are thus executable. This framework also provides a common formalism to define, compare and compose security systems and policies. We define transformations over secured systems in order to perform validation of classical security properties.