On obligations

Abstract

Access control is concerned with granting access to sensitive data based on conditions that relate to the past or present, so-called provisions. Expressing requirements from the domain of data protection necessitates extending this notion with conditions that relate to the future. Obligations, in this sense, are concerned with commitments of the involved parties. At the moment of granting access, adherence to these commitments cannot be guaranteed. An example is the requirement "do not re-distribute data", where the actions of the involved parties may not even be observable. We provide a formal framework that allows us to precisely specify data protection policies. A syntactic classification of formulas gives rise to natural and intuitive formal definitions of provisions and obligations. Based on this classification, we present different mechanisms for checking adherence to agreed upon commitments. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.