Analysis of Communicating Authorization Policies

Abstract

Abstract. We present a formal language for specifying distributed authorization policies that communicate through insecure asynchronous media. The language allows us to write declarative authorization policies; the interface between policy decisions and communication events can be specified using guards and policy updates. The attacker, who controls the communication media, is modeled as a message deduction engine. We give trace semantics to communicating authorization policies, and formulate a generic reachability problem. We show that the reachability problem is decidable for a large class of practically-relevant policies specified in our formal language.