Cassandra: Flexible Trust Management, Applied to Electronic Health Records. Moritz Y. Becker and Peter Sewell. In CSFW 2004. [ bib | doi | ps | pdf | http ]
We study the specification of access control policy in large-scale distributed systems. We present Cassandra, a language and system for expressing policy, and the results of a substantial case study, a security policy for a national Electronic Health Record system, based on the requirements for the ongoing UK National Health Service procurementexercise.

Cassandra policies are expressed in a language based on Datalog with constraints. The expressiveness of the language (and its computational complexity) can be tuned by choosing an appropriate constraint domain.

Cassandra is role-based; it supports credential-based access control (e.g. between administrative domains); and rules can refer to remote policies (for automatic credential retrieval and trust negotiation). Moreover, the policy language is small, and it has a formal semantics for query evaluation and for the access control engine. For the case study we choose a constraint domain C0 thatis sufficiently expressive to encode many policy idioms. The case study turns out to require many subtle variants of these; it is important to express this variety smoothly, rather than add them as ad hoc features. By ensuring only a constraint compact fragment of C0 is used, we guarantee a finite and computable fixed-point model. We use a top-down evaluation algorithm, for efficiency and to guarantee termination.

The case study (with some 310 rules and 58 roles) demonstrates that this language is expressive enough for a real-world application; preliminary results suggest that the per-formance should be acceptable.

 
Cassandra: Distributed Access Control Policies with Tunable Expressiveness. Moritz Y. Becker and Peter Sewell. In POLICY 2004. [ bib | doi | pdf | http ]
We study the specification of access control policy in large-scale distributed systems. Our work on real-world policies has shown that standard policy idioms such as role hierarchy or role delegation occur in practice in many subtle variants. A policy specification language should therefore be able to express this variety of features smoothly, rather than add them as specific features in an ad hoc way, as is the case in many existing languages. We present Cassandra, a role-based trust management system with an elegant and readable policy specification language based on Datalog with constraints. The expressiveness (and computational complexity) of the language can be adjusted by choosing an appropriate constraint domain. With just five special predicates, we can easily express a wide range of policies including role hierarchy, role delegation, separation of duties, cascading revocation, automatic credential discovery and trust negotiation. Cassandra has a formal semantics for query evaluation and for the access control enforcement engine. We use a goal-oriented distributed policy evaluation algorithm that is efficient and guarantees termination. Initial performance results for our prototype implementation have been promising.