Suppl: A flexible language for policies

Abstract

We present the Simple Unified Policy Programming Language (Suppl), a domain-neutral language for stating, executing, and analyzing event-condition-action policies. Suppl uses a novel combination of pure logic programming and disciplined imperative programming features to make it easy for non-expert users to express common policy idioms. The language is strongly typed and moded to allow static detection of common programming errors, and it supports a novel logic-based static analysis that can detect internally inconsistent policies. Suppl has been implemented as a compiler to Prolog and used to build several network security applications in a Java framework.