Beyond Proof-of-Compliance: Safety and Availability Analysis in Trust Management

  • Authors:
  • Ninghui Li;William H. Winsborough;John C. Mitchell

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • SP '03 Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Trust management is a form of distributed access controlusing distributed policy statements. Since one party maydelegate partial control to another party, it is natural toask what permissions may be granted as the result of policychanges by other parties. We study security propertiessuch as safety and availability for a family of trust managementlanguages, devising algorithms for deciding the possibleconsequences of certain changes in policy. While trustmanagement is more powerful in certain ways than mechanismsin the access matrix model, and the security propertiesconsidered are more than simple safety, we find that incontrast to the classical HRU undecidability of safety properties,our primary security properties are decidable. Inparticular, most properties we studied are decidable in polynomialtime. Containment, the most complicated securityproperty we studied, is decidable in polynomial time for thesimplest TM language in the family. The problem becomescoNP-hard when intersection or linked roles are added tothe language.