A propositional policy algebra for access control

Abstract

Security-sensitive environments protect their information resources against unauthorized use by enforcing access control mechanisms driven by access control policies. Due to the need to compare, contrast, and compose such protected information resources, access control policies regulating their manipulation need to be compared, contrasted, and composed. An algebra for manipulating such access control policies at a higher (propositional) level, where the operations of the algebra are abstracted from their specification details, is the subject of this paper. This algebra is applicable to policies that have controlled nondeterminism and all or nothing assignments of access privileges in their specification. These requirements reflect current practices in discretionary and role-based access control models. Therefore, the proposed algebra can be used to reason about role-based access control policies combined with other forms of discretionary policies. We show how to use algebraic identities to reason about consistency, completeness, and determinacy of composed policies using similar properties of their constituents.