Trust-Driven Policy Enforcement through Gate Automata

Abstract

Abstract-In this paper we introduce the notion of gate automata for describing security policies. This new kind of automata aim at defining a model for the specification of both security and trust policies.The main novelty of our proposal is a unified framework for the integration of security enforcement and trust monitoring. Indeed, gate automata watch the execution of a target program, possibly modifying its behaviour, and produce a feedback for the trust management system. The level of trust changes the environment settings by dynamically activating/deactivating some of the defined gate automata.

Gate automata-driven run-time enforcement

“…We can observe that gate automata extend the automata of [16] in two ways: (i) they can add and remove actions from the target's execution trace (rather than simply halt it) and (ii) they also use special actions for the trust management. For this reason, in [8] we showed that gate automata can be encoded using edit automata [13]. Gate automata differ from edit automata mainly because they manage trust.…”

“…In this paper we show an implementation of the S×C×T framework run-time support using gate automata. We advocate gate automata as a unique formalism for dealing with security and trust [8]. In particular, we show how they can be used for encoding both applications' contracts and security policies in the S×C×T implementation.…”

“…This paper is an extended version of the paper[8] presented at IMIS 2011. 66 Work partially supported by EU-funded project FP7-231167 CONNECT, by EU-funded project FP7-257930 ANIKETOS and EU-funded project FP7-256980 NESSOS.…”