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Analyzing XACML policies using answer set programming

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Abstract

With the tremendous growth of Web applications and services, eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) has been broadly adopted to specify Web access control policies. However, when the policies are large or defined by multiple authorities, it has proved difficult to analyze errors and vulnerabilities in a manual fashion. Recent advances in the answer set programming (ASP) paradigm have provided a powerful problem-solving formalism that is capable of dealing with policy verification. In this paper, we employ ASP to analyze various properties of XACML policies. To this end, we first propose a structured mechanism to translate a XACML policy into an ASP program. Then, we leverage the features of off-the-shelf ASP solvers to specify and verify a wide range of properties of a XACML policy, including redundancy, conflicts, refinement, completeness, reachability, and usefulness. We present an empirical evaluation of the effectiveness and efficiency of a policy analysis tool implemented on top of the Clingo ASP solver. The evaluation results show that our approach is computationally more efficient compared with existing approaches.

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Notes

  1. In this paper, the term policy refers to a security policy specified by XACML. Also terms “policy,” “security policy,” and “XACML policy” are used interchangeably.

  2. http://www.cs.uni-potsdam.de/clasp/.

  3. http://www.tcs.hut.fi/Software/smodels/.

  4. The combining algorithms are more complex, as described in [1], and we simplified them to show the main parts of our specifications.

  5. https://jaxb.java.net/.

  6. http://leonardi.unsw.wikispaces.net/.

  7. http://reasoning.eas.asu.edu/xacml2asp/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Engineering, Shahrood University of Technology, Shahrood, Iran

    Mohsen Rezvani

  2. School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

    David Rajaratnam, Aleksandar Ignjatovic, Maurice Pagnucco & Sanjay Jha

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  1. Mohsen Rezvani
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  2. David Rajaratnam
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  3. Aleksandar Ignjatovic
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  4. Maurice Pagnucco
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  5. Sanjay Jha
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Correspondence to Mohsen Rezvani.

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Rezvani, M., Rajaratnam, D., Ignjatovic, A. et al. Analyzing XACML policies using answer set programming. Int. J. Inf. Secur. 18, 465–479 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-018-0421-5

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