Enforceable Security Policies Revisited

Abstract

We revisit Schneider’s work on policy enforcement by execution monitoring. We overcome limitations of Schneider’s setting by distinguishing between system actions that are controllable by an enforcement mechanism and those actions that are only observable, that is, the enforcement mechanism sees them but cannot prevent their execution. For this refined setting, we give necessary and sufficient conditions on when a security policy is enforceable. To state these conditions, we generalize the standard notion of safety properties. Our classification of system actions also allows one, for example, to reason about the enforceability of policies that involve timing constraints. Furthermore, for different specification languages, we investigate the decision problem of whether a given policy is enforceable. We provide complexity results and show how to synthesize an enforcement mechanism from an enforceable policy.