An authoring framework for security policies: A use-case within the healthcare domain

Abstract

Traditionally, the definition and the maintenance of security and access control policies has been the exclusive task of system administrators or security officers. In modern distributed and heterogeneous systems, there exist the need to allow different stakeholders to create and edit their security and access control preferences. In order to solve this problem two main challenges need to be met. First, authoring tools with different user interfaces should be designed and adapted to meet domain background and the degree of expertise of each stakeholder. For example, policy authoring tools for a patient or a doctor should be user friendly and not contain any technical details, while those for a security administrators can be more sophisticated, containing more details. Second, conflicts that can arise among security policies defined by different stakeholders must be considered by these authoring tools on runtime. Furthermore, warnings and assisting messages must be provided to help defining correct policies and to avoid potential security risks. Towards meeting these challenges, we propose an authoring framework for security policies. This framework enables building authoring tools that take into consideration the views of different stakeholders. © 2011 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.