Access Control Policy Specification and Verification

Research Areas: End System Security, Policy, Law and Management,

Principal Investigator: Ninghui Li

This research program is motivated by the observation that today’s security problems are often caused by errors in policy specification and management, rather than failure in, for example, cryptographic primitives. Formal verification techniques have been successfully applied to the design and analysis of hardware, software, distributed algorithms, and cryptographic protocols. This project aims at achieving similar success in access control.

This project studies novel approaches to specifying properties about access control policies and the verification of them. Recent results include security analysis in trust management and role based access control, analyzing the relationship between separation of duty policies and role mutual exclusion constraints, the development of a novel algebra for specifying multi-user policies, the introduction of resiliency policies, and so on.

Personnel

  • Mahesh Tripunitara
  • Qihua Wang

Keywords: policy, cryptography, security analysis, verification