Concurrent enforcement of usage control policies

Abstract

Policy-based approaches to the management of systems distinguish between the specification of requirements, in the form of policies, and their enforcement on the system. In this work we focus on the latter aspect and investigate the enforcement of stateful policies in a concurrent environment. As a representative of stateful policies we use the UCON model and show how dependencies between policy rules affect their enforcement. We propose a technique for enforcing policies concurrently based on the static analysis of dependencies between policies. The potential of our technique for improving the efficacy of enforcement mechanisms is illustrated using a small, but representative example. © 2008 IEEE.